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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

Familiarity with command prompts and shell scripts is still necessary if you want to get the most from your GNU/Linux system, but the less time you spend doing that the better, right? Two powerful ways to minimize your time at the command line are shell aliases and functions. The examples that follow are for the bash shell, but all the concepts and most of the code are valid for other shells too. Shell aliases are alternative, easy-to-remember names for long commands that you need to execute frequently.

The University of the Western Cape (UWC) and the African Virtual Open Initiatives and Resources (AVOIR) project have released version 1.0.1 of the Chisimba/KEWL3 Realtime Virtual Classroom. Avoir is a a collaboration of 13 African universities specialising in creating free software relevant to African users.

Social media may be hailed as the savior of sagging sales these days, but few have figured out what social media are, much less how to wield them. Even fewer realize that games are the first, and arguably the most viable and sustainable, social medium in the mix.

Back in 2001, I landed my (then) dream job as a full-time Linux kernel developer and distribution maintainer for a small embedded systems company. I was thrilled - and horrified. I'd only been working as a programmer for a couple of years and I was sure it was only a matter of time before my new employer figured out they'd hired an idiot. The only solution was to learn more about operating systems, and quickly. So I pulled out my favorite operating systems textbook and read and re-read it obsessively over the course of the next year. It worked well enough that my company tried very hard to convince me not to quit when I got bored with my "dream job" and left to work at Sun.

Storage is the Achilles' heel of virtualization projects, said LeftHand Networks Inc. as it announced a new version of its iSCSI SAN software, which it claimed could ease the task of rolling out virtual desktop infrastructures (VDI). The company said that the Linux-based software, called SAN/iQ Version 8, runs on an x86 server -- or preferably a pair of them, for redundancy -- and uses storage virtualization technology to turn a bunch of disk arrays into a powerful but relatively cheap SAN in a box. LeftHand said that new features in Version 8 -- including SmartClone volumes, an integrated performance manager, a virtual connection manager and application programming interfaces (API) for links to other management consoles -- would make it easier to manage virtualized environments and cut storage costs.