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When Google launched Android, its open source mobile operating system, it knew full well that it might have a trademark battle on its hands. Google had been denied a mark for the name "Android," due to possible confusion with the "Android Data" trademark held by the owner of a company that had gone defunct. The case could air some interesting legal arguments but, like most lawsuits, it will likely settle.

I need to extend my programming knowledge, I know as a system administrator, I should automate everything I need to do more than twice and therefore I need more programming skills. I've been thinking of learning shell programming, as it is the most ubiquitous in Linux systems. I already know some shell programming and for most of the simple tasks I can easily write a small shell script. The problem is I really need more to become more skilled, to speed up the things I do and make my life easier.

Unfortunately, maintaining a multi-boot configuration like this can be a pain, especially if you later install an operating system which overwrites the GRUB boot loader you had in place (such as a version of Windows). If your boot loader is overwritten, you could be left with no choice but to boot the most recently installed OS. In this tutorial, I will show you how to restore an overwritten copy of the GRUB boot loader by using a Linux live CD. In this example, my master GRUB installation is on a Kubuntu 8.10 installation, and I’m using an older Kubuntu 8.04 Live CD I have lying around. This tutorial does require you to have some understanding of how your multi-boot system operates, disk partitions and using the command line. If you are not confident, perhaps find a friend who knows Linux more intimately to do this process.

I have used virtualization in many different forms, OpenVZ, Xen, VMWare, for a number of years with great success. One thing I have been interested in doing is moving away from all applications that are not OpenSource. So finding a good solution for the Desktop virtualization has been a process. In that I am now running Debian 5 Lenny for the desktop workstation I thought I would try VirtualBox.

Adeona has been widely touted as the Open Source solution to recovering a stolen laptop or netbook. Adeona helps you track it down when the thief connects to the Internet. But Adeona isn't quite ready for prime time yet; A. Lizard goes into the whys and hows.

I don't write because I think what I have to say is important...I write to draw your comments. That being said, the Deja Vu article drew some notable comments. I wrote it to state that I had the same revelation the "Linux Sucks" author had recently, only several years before. One comment in particular stood out and I thought I would share it verbatim, as a feature article. Thank you Magice for sharing your knowledge and thoughts. I believe they are important.

With three months having passed since the release of ALSA 1.0.19, it is now time for an update to the Advanced Linux Sound Architecture. ALSA 1.0.20 was announced this morning and it brings forth a slew of bug-fixes and other audio driver updates for Linux.

Look at what I have running in Xfce 4.4 on my OpenBSD 4.4 laptop. Do you think I should stop some of the Xfce services I have in my panels? There are maybe seven or eight in there that use about 10 MB of RAM each. On this 768 MB system, should I be giving up 70 MB of RAM to panel apps in Xfce?

If there's one fact of life for large companies, it's that small companies and individuals are going to sue to try to get a piece of your much bigger pie. As corporate pies come, Google has a pretty big one, and they've had no shortage of suits over the years from those looking to get their knife in the company's pie-pan. Such is the case again, as according to reports the search giant has been served with a lawsuit over its use of the name "Android" for its popular mobile phone platform.

The developers of the CoreBoot project have released version 0.9,0 of FlashROM, which is able to read, delete, rewrite and verify the flash chips which store a systems BIOS. FlashROM runs on Linux and UNIX derivatives such as FreeBSD, DragonFly BSD, Solaris and Mac OS X and allows re-flashing to take place from the command line on a running operating system. With most manufacturers' flash programming utilities, there is only support for Windows or DOS and they require the user to reboot into DOS, from a floppy disk, or an installed Windows system, re-flash the BIOS, then reboot back into Linux.

A recent test shows that the promised Open Document Format (ODF) compatibility of Microsoft Office Service Pack 2 is far from it. At least table calculations in Excel SP2 demonstrate big problems when converting ODF values.

With the release of Ubuntu 9.04 I figured it was time for me to download the ISO and see what this new version of Ubuntu brings to the table. While I was at it I also decided to get the Kubuntu 9.04 ISO and if I had time I would check that out as well.

I have just uploaded Embedded GLIBC (EGLIBC) into the archive (it is currently waiting in the NEW queue), which will soon replace the GNU C Library (GLIBC). The EGLIBC is a variant of the GLIBC which stays source and binary compatible with the original GLIBC. While primarily targeted for embedded architectures, it has some really nice points..

Business continuity planning and disaster recovery is an essential business risk management technique which is great on paper but often doesn't deliver when it needs to. Business continuity planning is also expensive and has always been something only large corporates, with large budgets, could afford. But now, with cloud computing, even small businesses can put a plan in place to ensure they are able to continue their business in the face of a radical environment changes.

Besides the efforts to make MonoDevelop play nice in MacOS X, we've also been doing progress in the Windows side.

This guide explains how you can do a live migration of an OpenVZ container from one OpenVZ host to the other. Both OpenVZ hosts are running on Debian Lenny in this article, but the live migration does not differ on other distributions.

Merger activity in the tech sector has dropped precipitously from a year earlier, but the landscape is quickly changing as confidence returns. M&A activity in the first three months of the year plunged 85% from a year earlier, with only 625 deals worth $8 billion completed, according to tech research firm 451 Group. The first quarter of 2008 saw 835 deals worth $55.2 billion inked.

Here it is, the moment many of you have been waiting for: the U.S. Trustee's office, through its counsel Joseph J. McMahon, Jr., has filed a motion in the SCO bankruptcy proceeding to convert the SCO's Chapter 11 to Chapter 7. And I think this will be your favorite sentence: "Additionally, not only is there no reasonable chance of "rehabilitation" in these cases, the Debtors have tried — and failed — to liquidate their business in chapter 11." So what's left? Dismissal or, more logically, Chapter 7.

We've been making good progress towards CrossOver 8.0. In fact, we are feeling confident enough about our progress that we put out a public release of the first beta. Additionally, I'm happy to say that we've leveraged Francois Gouget's hard work, along with a lot of work from the broader community, and have put out unsupported builds for FreeBSD and OpenSolaris.

Open source project Nagios is being forked into the Icinga project. The Netways firm, which specializes in open source IT management services and particularly the monitoring solution Nagios, will be managing the fork.