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With Ubuntu, Canonical has had notable success in convincing people to switch from other platforms, but potential Ubuntu users are still running into trouble in several areas. Having spent some time on Canonical's forums, I've identified 10 points that seem to be common sticking points for new users -- that is, problems that have the potential to prevent a new user from adopting Ubuntu in the long term. These problems span the entire Ubuntu experience, but they all have two things in common: they are all serious enough to evoke the dreaded "I tried Linux but it didn't work" excuse, and they are all solvable.

Discussion of phishing schemes and ways to counter them effectively.

Sometime back, I had a couple of encounters with OpenSUSE, the so-called community distribution which was started by Novell in 2005. Neither of them was exactly salutary. For example, in October last year, version 10.3 was released and my efforts to see what it was all about were frustrated to a large extent by the downloads themselves.

Ease the pain of migrating device control applications from Microsoft Windows to Linux. In this article, we analyze how device control works in both operating systems, examining everything from architecture to system calls and focusing on the differences. The authors outline these differences and give you a C/C++ migration sample.

Calao Systems has started shipping half a dozen expansion modules for its tiny USB key-sized Linux computer. The company has also launched a new low-powered USB computer that runs FreeRTOS, and offers CAN and LIN (local interconnect network) bus expansion.

What's new in this release (see below for details):

- Many more gdiplus functions implemented.
- Improved graphics tablet support.
- Many Richedit fixes and improvements.
- Support for HWND_MESSAGE windows.
- A lot of new MSHTML functions.
- Many fixes in MSI registry handling.
- Initial implementation of the inetmib1 DLL.
- Improvements to the quartz renderers.
- Various bug fixes.

A simple command line procedure for making one-off backups of some large files to DVDs or a USB drive.

A systems administrator always needs to be cognizant of system performance. This article drills down into the many aspects of tuning AIX to run Oracle. We'll look at the Virtual Memory Manager (VMM), CPU, Memory, and I/O (disk and network).

If you work some of the time on your laptop and some of the time on your desktop box, making sure that your work is updated on both machines is a must. Many tools can help you accomplish this, from command-line tools such as scp and rsync to generic graphical applications like Konqueror or Krusader, to more specific tools like Unison. Komparator and KDiff3, a couple of KDE applications with interesting features, may offer better ways of syncing your work.

This tutorial will walk you through setting up DHCP failover on CentOS 5.1 using the default ISC dhcp server, this can easily be adapted to any other Linux distro out there. You will most likely need failover in environments where network down time can not be tolerated. My home is running a DLNA setup so I need my devices to be able to obtain network parameters at all times.

Whatever you think about Microsoft, they seem to be losing a lot of market share recently, the question is, how can Linux capture those users?

"I've always done the things that nobody else wanted to do," Michelle Bisson says, explaining how she became the only woman on the core team for the Joomla! content management system. "I say, 'Oh, that needs to be done? Okay, I'll do what I can.'" This outlook is responsible not only for making her one of the founders of the Joomla! project, but also for giving her an unusual degree of insight into how non-developers can contribute to free and open source software projects (FOSS).

Quick command reference, cheat sheet or crib sheet, for SunCluster Administration. Pick your descriptive of choice :)

Steganos Locknote is a handy little GPL-licensed utility for Windows, built using the Crypto++ class library. It is designed to keep text files secure, so you can store your sensitive information and passwords without having to worry about the information falling into the wrong hands. At 312KB, Locknote is quick and easy to download, and requires no installation. Once you have it, just double-click the icon. Locknote presents you with a small text window with instructions for using the program. Highlight and erase the instructions (don't worry, Locknote displays the same instructions each time you open it) and type or paste your own notes into the window.

Linus Torvalds has an uncomfortable pause at 44:24 in this video. The uncomfortable pause occurs when he concludes a confused critique of the GNU General Public License.

"Bottom line is. Nvidia, you say no to freedomware drivers, I say no to you. How about that? Perhaps with enough people in the market acting on that same sentiment will make the value of NVIDIA's precious "intellectual property" suddenly seem trivial."

The extremely lightweight Swiss GNU/Linux distribution Slitaz burst upon the scene in March of this year promising to be easy on system resources yet possessing enough power in the form of basic applications to actually get things done. I've been looking for new distros to run on the $15 Laptop (Compaq Armada 7770dmt), and I decided to finally give Slitaz a spin in it.

A lot of software users I meet seem to feel they are not using their software as efficiently as they could. If that includes you, then listen up. Here is my list of the ten, lesser-known, OpenOffice.org Writer keyboard shortcuts that will help you improve your productivity. When I say "lesser known" I should really say poorly documented or not documented at all. That said, when I've taught on keyboard shortcuts in the past these are the ones that fewer users seem to know of. Something else to note is that although these are all for Writer, you may find some of them in other word processors as well. Read the full story at FSM

There are many obstacles in creating the workflow for an organization which can lead you to believe that designing a workflow is difficult. How you are able to deal with these will depend on your organization and the people that are available to you. At least once you've read this article, you'll know that, once you've overcome those problems, the workflow itself will be easy.

In a move aimed at consolidating their efforts to support Linux use on mobile phones, the Linux Phone Standards (LiPS) Forum is merging into the LiMo (Linux Mobile) Foundation. The two groups — consortiums of suppliers of components such as chip sets, Linux operating systems, mobile application stacks and handsets, as well as regional and global wireless service providers — said they hope that joining forces will make the platform stronger.