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Plenty of people say Ubuntu isn't ready for prime time. But what they really mean is "I don't want to learn a new operating system." Here's how I convinced my wife to overcome her fear of switching to Ubuntu. Take a look.

Things go wrong. Hard disks fail and whole servers crash. Luckily, many Linux-based distributions are available to help systems administrators handle minor catastrophes. We looked at four of the most portable, all of which fit on a 210MB mini CD -- SliTaz, Parted Magic, GParted, and RIPLinuX. Each of these distributions is easy to use -- just insert the CD or plug in the USB drive on which it's installed, then boot. Each gives you access to a variety of open source tools that you can use to manage disks, partitions, and files and perform diagnostics and network troubleshooting. These distributions provide most of the tools that you might need in an emergency situation.

WebVZ is one of the simplest and most powerful web management tools for OpenVZ. This article explains how you can install WebVZ 2.0 on a Debian Etch system.

A while ago I reviewed 6 GUI clients for IRC, so today I'll continue with the second part with this review of 5 CLI (Command Line Interface) clients.

If you tallied up the strengths and weaknesses of Linux and Windows, which OS would come out ahead? According to Jack Wallen, superiority in security, flexibility, interoperability, community, and command-line power (among other things) put Linux well ahead. See if you agree with his assessment.

Like a diamond, a digital media player or a rare coin, the latest mini-notebooks are good things in small packages. By squeezing a lot of computing power into a very mobile package at a hard-to-beat price, they are turning the established mobile pecking order on its head. Until recently, the smallest and lightest notebooks commanded the highest price tags. Take, for example, Lenovo's ThinkPad X300 and Apple's MacBook Air -- they each weigh about 3 pounds, sell for between $2,500 and $3,000 and are the envy of travelers the world over.

If you're part of a software development team that performs multiple daily builds, then you might replace the term "continuous integration" with "continuous build failure." A company called Electric Cloud may offer a solution. The software production tools maker later this month will begin shipping ElectricCommander 3.0, the latest version of its build automation system that can now check or "preflight" newly modified source code to determine if it will correctly build into an application. Version 3.0 also now integrates with Eclipse and Visual Studio.

Although companies can stick their feet into virtual worlds for a mere tens of thousands of dollars, serious return on investment really requires expenditures in the range of hundreds of thousands of dollars, according to Sibley Verbeck, CEO of The Electric Sheep Company, a virtual worlds software, content and services provider.

Given the prevalence of DirectX nowadays, we tend to forget that 10 years ago an all-out war was being waged between Microsoft and Silicon Graphics in the field of 3D APIs. The two companies were both trying to win over developers, with Microsoft using its financial muscle and SGI relying on its experience and its reputation in the field of real-time 3D.

It's been noted (and I know that it's true) that the spread-system used in the last portion of our Perl script (posted yesterday in our entry regarding maximizing guaranteed matches) was somewhat uneven. The end result, of course, being that your given set-numbers from pool-numbers (3 from 5, 4 from 6, etc) guaranteed that the sets would be included in the generated pools, but (as was noticed by a few people, including myself) the downside (?) ends up being that the front-numbers are more heavily weighted.

Recently I purchased new laptop - A Toshiba A300D. Although my first computer was randomly chosen with absolutely no pre-purchase selection that laptop was very carefully selected among many others. So, I knew that it should work at least at the minimum level with my favourite GNU/Linux distribution - Fedora. To be honest I planed to put on that laptop another distribution - Mandriva. Not because I did not like the last version of Fedora but because I got some kind exhausted of that distribution. I do not know how other users work but I need to change the distro from time to time. I have tried Freespire, Debian for a while, SuSE 9.x for a bit longer, and Mandriva. But I always returned to my favourite one - Fedora.

This three-part "Setting up your own on-demand video site with PHP" series takes you through everything you need to know to create video optimized for the Web, as well as creating a PHP application that will help keep your videos organized and accessible.

Larry Cafiero is sitting in his cluttered office in the Santa Cruz Mountains looking nothing like a revolutionary. Friendly bearded face. Casual blue jeans. Comfy work shirt with the little penguin logo. Yeah, penguin logo. See, Cafiero is a Linux guy. Maybe you know one — or a Linux woman. Maybe you know that to love Linux is to live Linux — that you don't just use free and open-source software, you embrace it and evangelize it. Some more than others.

Researchers at UCSB have demonstrated how ridiculously easy it is to compromise voting machines from Sequoia Voting Systems, which are currently used in 17 states and the District of Columbia.

Although Google Inc. has yet to come up with Mac or Linux editions of its new Chrome browser, CodeWeavers Inc., a company best known for its CrossOver software, has assembled imitations for those operating systems using Google's own source code. St. Paul, Minn.-based CodeWeavers, which sells software that lets Linux or Mac systems run some Windows applications -- notably, Microsoft Office, Internet Explorer, Quicken and a few others -- crafted its CrossOver Chromium browsers using Google's source code and Wine, an open-source implementation of the Windows API for Unix-like operating systems, such as Mac OS X and Linux.

As reported by Gizmodo, Microsoft and OLPC just announced the first official pilot of XO laptops running Microsoft Windows. I am Lionel Laské, President and co-founder of OLPC France and to be honest it's not really a surprise. We hear from months that the agreement between OLPC and Microsoft will be a good way to win new country deployment.

In this second part of my survey I list and briefly describe some of the Java sound and music applications known to work under Linux. Java applications show up in almost every category found atlinux-sound.org and theApplications Database at linuxaudio.org. The scalability of the language is well-demonstrated throughout those pages where one can find everything from highly specialized mini-applications to full-size production environments. Of course I can't cover or even present the entire range of Java soundapps, but this survey should give readers a good idea of Java's potential in the sound and music software domain. Again the presentation is in no special order.

Don't get into IT because you want an air-conditioned office. Get into it because it's your passion. Not sure it's your passion? There are a lot of free tools that'll help you explore.

If the question is "how low can you go" in terms of computer memory, it's all about applications. If you stayed in the Linux console and never ran X, just about anybody could be happy with 32 MB of RAM. It might be hard to actually run Linux or a BSD in 16 MB, but I've heard of Linux distributions that will do it, Damn Small Linux, Tom's RtBt and DeLi Linux among them. But as much as the hard-core users talk about how they stay at the command line all the time, it's hard to get much done strictly in a console when you're a regular person.

This year Software Freedom Day has some outstanding events planned around the world. There is increased support in Government, education and the industry in helping take software freedom to the masses!

VMware yesterday unveiled a series of solutions yesterday--its Virtual Datacenter OS and related products--that I personally believe are a gigantic advance not just for IT administrators, but for software developers and testers too. And that's just the beginning. The company also introduced a new way of packaging applications with the potential to allow them to execute on any platform or as a stand-alone appliance.

aMSN is a free open source MSN Messenger clone for Windows,Linux,Unix & Mac with features like offline messaging, voice clips, picture display, custom emoticons, webcam support, full speed file transfer, chat logs etc

Are you looking to share files online, back up your own data or transfer files between Windows, Mac and Linux systems? Take a look at Dropbox, a terrific online service that just came out of beta mode combines file and folder mirroring/synchronization with an easy-to-use online interface that's efficient and well-designed. You can set up the service on any of your systems (it supports Windows, Mac, and Linux).

I spoke to Rob Jackson, who started the Phandroid blog and the AndroidForums.com discussion groups and asked him about the impact of the release of the first Android-powered (open source) cell phone, the HTC Dream, which is due for release by T-Mobile on Oct. 20th

Hewlett-Packard is cutting nearly 25,000 jobs. Now, Groundwork Open Source, which competes against HP OpenView, is seeking to capitalize on those major changes at HP. Here's how.

The ability to save user settings can come in handy if you want to make your OpenOffice.org solutions more flexible, efficient, and user-friendly. In this article, we take a look at how to save user settings in a plain text file and then retreive them from there. In the very first installment of our ongoing crash course series we talked about how to launch external applications using the OOo Basic Shell function.

Anyone expecting the soon-to-be-launched Google phone to change the market like Apple's iPhone has over the past year will likely be disappointed -- for now. Industry insiders who have worked on Google's Android mobile operating system say it will struggle in the near term to match the consumer enthusiasm generated by Apple when its iPhone redefined the touch-screen phone market and greatly improved mobile Web surfing.

Several groupware developers have come together to work on Project OpenMapi, an open source API, based on Microsoft's Mapi.

OpenEMR HQ announced today that it has posted the firstpublic screenshots of its upcoming software release called Phoenix to aspecial area of its website specially set up as a resource for those interested in the project.

Joomla!, a very popular content management system (CMS) is as you may know an easy-to-deploy-and-use content management system. This ease of use has lent itself to rapid growth of both the CMS and extensions for it. You can install it on almost any host, running Linux or Windows. This highly versatile software has found itself in such lofty places as large corporate web portals, and humble places such as the simple blog.

The Linux Exposition of Southern California is proud to announce the 7th Annual Southern California Linux Expo scheduled for February 20-22, 2009 at the Westin Hotel near the Los Angeles International Airport. Wide spread acceptance and encouragement from the user community has established SCALE as a premiere Linux/Open Source conference in the Southern California region.

Zend Technologies today is set to announce a series of alliances intended to allow its PHP framework and development environment to work with other widely deployed RIA technologies from Adobe, Dojo and IBM. In a keynote speech at ZendCon, the company's annual PHP developer conference in Cupertino, Calif., Zend CEO Harold Goldberg reportedly was to deliver the news.

It's good to see news about continuing adoption of open source software in schools around the world. I've written before about how doable it would be for many American schools to reduce costs, increase efficiency and arm kids with Linux notebooks through open source adoption. I've also concluded that excessive love of the Mac and the improbability of the arrival of paperless processes will keep many schools from taking the FOSS leap. However, schools in Oldham, England--a metropolitan borough of Manchester--are leaping.

Sun has been getting serious about opening up its software for a few years now. OpenSolaris, an open source Unix operating system like Linux and BSD, released in May, is its latest foray into the open source arena. I found OpenSolaris to be a production-ready OS that works equally well on desktops and servers. OpenSolaris is released under Sun's Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL), which isn't compatible with the GNU Public License (GPL) used by Linux. This means that lots of the technology in OpenSolaris won't be making its way into Linux any day soon. Also, OpenSolaris isn't 100% free, as some components are available only in binary form under the OpenSolaris Binary License.

"There is a need for something, something to explain the license I'm not sure I would call it a EULA because that has a meaning to many people of adding restrictions to software and we won't be doing that," Baker said. "We'll be having a license agreement much as Red Hat has a license agreement that says the software is available under the GPL and don't use our trademarks etcetera. So we'll have a license agreement but we won't think of it as a EULA."