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This tutorial shows how you can upgrade your GRUB bootloader to GRUB 2 on Ubuntu 9.04. GRUB 2 has been rewritten from scratch to clean up everything for modularity and portability.

The Linux community is very fragmented. This does not have to be a bad thing at all. Diversity is important for innovation and choice for users. However, because there are so many different projects, people sometimes get at other Linux users within the community.

Red Hat today launched the Catalyst Program, which empowers partners with complete open source software stacks that could rival traditional closed source stacks from Oracle and Microsoft. Here’s the scoop from Red Hat Summit and JBoss World in Chicago — plus some bigger-picture observations.

Parallels Inc. today released a new version of its Windows/Linux desktop virtualization software, saying it should be able to run some applications as much as eight times faster than its prior version. Parallels is perhaps best known for its Parallels Desktop for Mac application, which lets users run Windows software on Mac computers, but it has several other similar products. One is Parallels Workstation 2.2, which let users create Windows or Linux virtual machines and run them as "guests" on top of Windows, Linux or Mac OS X computers.

Yesterday, we brought you the first of two pieces covering a recent post by Esther Schindler summarizing What Open Source Projects Need to Know About Interacting with the Press, the presentation she co-lead with openSUSE Community Manager Joe Brockmeier, O'Reilly's James Turner, and Page One PR's Jennifer Cloer, who oversees public relations for the Linux Foundation. Today we conclude with Schindler's final point, and our own suggestions.

On July 16, Brad Spengler disclosed an easily-exploitable kernel vulnerability based on getting the kernel to dereference a null pointer. This security hole affected a version of the kernel which had not been widely distributed, so it was a problem for relatively few users, but it highlighted a class of problems which was sure to be seen again. Given that, and given our community's perception of itself as being responsive to security problems, it should be safe to assume that steps were taken to prevent null pointer vulnerabilities from opening up systems in the future. The reality is that some things have truly improved, but that some important vulnerabilities remain.

As we all know, OSCON provides a multitude of opportunities for those in the Open Source world to learn not just the ins and outs of what's new, but how to improve their projects on fronts ranging from code to documentation to community members. One such opportunity at this year's convention came in the form of a panel presentation on press relations, a subject that can be both touchy and treacherous where PR pros are scarce. As that's the business we're in, and our readership includes many in target audience, we thought it would be beneficial to pass on.

Over the weekend, I decided to see which of the major operating systems would be the easiest to update. The answer may surprise you.

OpenOffice.org 3 is the leading open-source open software suite for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, graphics, databases and more. It is available in many languages and works on all common computers. You can adjust openoffice to your needs by adding more functionality with the help of extensions, for installation guide you will find it at the end of this article.

I'm a blogger but I like to write about personal things that don't belong in a blog. I have been using a standard text editor to manage my personal writings but there are always shortcomings with standard editors when it comes to keeping a personal journal. I recently happened upon a very nice application tailored specifically for people who keep a personal journal.

When the Red Hat Summit (and the associated JBoss World) conferences kick off Sept. 1 in Chicago, The VAR Guy will be watching closely for new developments involving Qumranet virtualizations, Cisco Systems, EnterpriseDB and Alfresco. Here's the scoop and an early look at Red Hat Summit.

Wikipedia wants to give users more confidence in the reliability of its information, so it has come up with a color-coding scheme that will assign an orange background to less-trustworthy information -- the darker, the more suspect -- and a white background to content that ranks high for accuracy. However, Wikipedia hasn't said much about how it will arrive at its rankings.

If you have any (non-tech support) questions about NVIDIA and Linux, ask away! Phoronix will be hosting a Q&A with NVIDIA regarding their Linux graphics driver. If you have any questions to ask, click on the "Comments & Discussion" button below and ask away in our forums. After a few days we will be narrowing down the list of questions before NVIDIA begins answering them.

In my post two weeks ago, I introduced you to KDE’s KIO slaves and gave you a brief overview of the services they offer. One of the KIO protocols is remote:/, which relies on KNetAttach to create virtual network folders. With it, you can create folders for the following services: 1. WebFolder (webdav) 2. FTP 3. Microsoft Windows network drive (using Samba) 4. Secure shell (ssh) Each one has its slightly unique features and requirements, and in this post, you will learn about each one.

According to a new report, the market for netbook computers grew 40 percent from the first to the second quarter of 2009, almost twice the rate of standard notebooks. Netbook shipments actually outstripped notebooks in Latin America and Greater China.

Apple started the App Store revolution. Canonical hopes to continue it with the Ubuntu Software Store for Ubuntu 9.10 and Ubuntu 10.10. I bet eager adopters will be kids who are already familiar with the iPod Touch (iTouch) and Apple App Store.

Apache Wink is a new framework for developing "RESTful web services". The project currently resides in the Apache Incubator, where newly introduced projects within the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) are matured and evaluated for promotion to full Apache projects, having entered the incubator in May. The code base for Wink was contributed by HP and IBM, who also intend to oversee the project in the future.

Anyone wanting to watch just a short video on YouTube probably won't need Minitube, for those that want more, it's a must-have app. Minitube is a classic Unix program for the playback of YouTube films. Enter a keyword and the program will retrieve all relative URLs from YouTube and play them one after the other. With a binary of just 440KByte, Minitube does without Flashplayer, is advertisement-free and relies fully on the Phonon framework for audio and video support.

The Slackware team released version 13 of its venerable Linux distribution, now supporting 64-bit computers. Slackware 13 provides "completely reworked" X packages, upgrades to KDE 4.2.4 and Xfce 4.6.1 desktops, a new .txz package format, and support for Ext4 and the GRUB bootloader, says the project.

In my last article I wrote about accessing a PostgreSQL database in C/C++. In this article, I'm going to discuss performing the same functions in C against an SQLite database. Unlike Postgresql and the supporting libraries, SQLite creates completely self-contained databases that aren't dependant upon a client-server architecture.