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Anyone who was lucky enough to grab a GrandCentral account during one of the short spans when they were available to grab can testify that it is an interesting service, to say the least. As interesting as it may be, though, it has been plagued with technical and customer service issues that had some declaring that Google had left the platform for dead. A reasonable assumption — until this morning, that is.

Being an open source advocate apparently can be dangerous to your health -- or at least your hair. That's what Helios' Ken Starks found, anyway, when a field technician took issue with the threat of FOSS to his livelihood. Then there are the tips, lots of Linux tips.

So you're not a programmer, you say? If you can string a few shell commands together, it's not much of a step from there to programming. To demonstrate that, Akkana Peck will take you through the steps of writing a very simple web gallery script: one that will take your images and build a little web page to show them off.

Despite the recession, open source companies are marketing forward with major partner and customer conferences. The latest examples involve Pentaho (the open source BI specialist), Openbravo (ERP and POS) and MySQL. Here's the scoop from The VAR Guy.

After two years, the relatively popular PCLinuxOS distribution has finally put out a new major release, imaginatively called PCLinuxOS 2009.1. PCLinuxOS is a release originally based on Mandrake (now Mandriva), but which has taken on a life of its own. The distribution has one selling point (for some, at least) few other popular distributions have: it eschews KDE4 (for now).

Operating Debian and getting things done within it is just as simple as in Windows. Those Microsoft commercials depicting a little girl "amazing" the crowd with her click-and-drag-prowess don't have anything over on Debian.

4 tips to avoid or fix Linux system cannot mount rootfs errors at boot time. As a Linux® administrator, you may encounter rootfs errors like cannot mount rootfs and kernel panic when you try to reboot a server after attaching volumes from external storage or even after installing a new Linux operating system.. This article outlines the Linux booting process on an x86 platform, shows why this problem happens, and offers four tips to avoid it or fix it.

Google has strengthened its mobile services with the debut of a service called Voice that could be a challenge to Skype and other phone firms. It lets customers make cheap international calls and gives them a speech-to-text feature for voicemail. The services are available thanks to Google's acquisition of phone firm GrandCentral which gives users a lifelong universal phone number. "This could be big. Google is seen as disruptive," said analyst Jon Arnold.

The Pluggable Authentication Module (PAM) API exposes a set of functions that application programmers use for security-related functions like user authentication, data encryption, LDAP, and more. In this article, get a basic guide to the PAM model on Linux, see how to configure PAM, and learn how to design a sample PAM login application in 10 easy steps.

The new iPod Shuffle isn't just smaller - it's easier to swallow (and steal).

If you want to see where the technology industry is heading in the next few years, a quick review of the past might be useful. As Amar Bhide of Columbia Business School reminds us in Thursday's Wall Street Journal, the personal computer industry was born in the pain of the 1980s economic recession. Why then? "History suggests that Americans don't shirk from venturesome consumption in hard times," Bhide writes, suggesting that consumers show a appetite for risk that far exceeds the near-term value they individually derive from things like software and mobile devices, a tendency that is unlikely to abate in our recessed economy.

There are small Linux distributions, and then there are tiny Linux distributions. In what must be one of the smallest Linux versions ever, Tiny Core Linux is a portable Linux desktop that is just 10MB in size. With the 10MB disk image in hand users can run it from a CD, USB drive or just as a minimal hard drive installation.

These days everyone is looking for a bargain, and laptop manufacturers are eager to deliver. Sure, you can still spend $1,000 (or much more) for state-or-the-art hardware that runs the latest versions of commercial software with ease. But now you can also get a netbook that does everything you really need for under $400. In many cases, manufacturers of these lower cost notebooks are relying on open-source technology as a means to lower the price. Compared to its commercial counterparts, open-source software generally requires fewer resources and provides greater security. By going with open source on your laptop, you probably won't feel the effects of a slower processor and less memory, and you'll be less likely to be victimized by hackers.

Intel's netbook dominance has yet to be challenged in a serious way, but at least one business analyst thinks that's going to change in the next 2-3 years. The netbook market is extremely new; Atom itself isn't even a year old—if the IT industry were to break with the existing Intel+Microsoft model, the emergence of a new product type combined with a deep economic recession could be the perfect opportunity to do it. Analyst Robert Castellano from The Information Network believes future netbooks based on the upcoming ARM Cortex-A9 architecture and running Linux could create a market for netbooks at price points Intel and Microsoft simply won't be able to match. Not only would the multicore A9 be cheaper than a 2012 Atom, the assumed ubiquitousness of cloud computing would supposedly eliminate (or almost eliminate) the need for local storage.

Russia is rapidly turning into open source's best-kept secret. A little while back I wrote about plans to roll out free software to all schools; more recently, there has been talk about creating a Russian operating system based on Fedora. And now there's this: A plan which foresee all Russian government departments using free software, and civil servants being trained in its use.

This guide explains how you can set up an iSCSI target and an iSCSI initiator (client), both running Debian Lenny. The iSCSI protocol is a storage area network (SAN) protocol which allows iSCSI initiators to use storage devices on the (remote) iSCSI target using normal ethernet cabling. To the iSCSI initiator, the remote storage looks like a normal, locally-attached hard drive.

Maybe the smallest desktop-based Linux distribution, which requires only 10 MB free space on an USB drive, CD or an internal hard disk drive, Tiny Core Linux could give you a new experience and maximum Internet speed with a customizable X desktop and by running entirely in RAM. The Tiny Core Linux distribution is powered by Linux 2.6 kernel, Busybox, Tiny X, Fltk and Jwm. It shows fast booting speed and the latest version (Tiny Core Linux 1.2) comes with many improvements and bug fixes.

For years, my friend Stephen J. Vaughan-Nichols has been trying to turn Linux into something it is not: A successful and popular desktop operating system. Everyone needs a reason to get up in the morning and I am glad he has found such a long lasting (and profitable) one. He is a smart guy, but I am still waiting for the Linux that will change my life. His latest foray into "Linux is the next big thing" is a discussion of Google's Android operating system running on future netbooks. Stephen then over-generalizes to call Android "Google's...own contender for desktop operating system king." And in a paragraph that starts by talking about Windows 7, no less. This is simply wrong.

[Note the disclaimer at the bottom: "David Coursey's closest brush with a desktop "ix" operating system is his Macintosh." - Sander]

Paper - don't you just hate it? We live in the 'information age', and yet the much promised era of the paperless office still seems decades away. Our desks are cluttered with notes, reminders and scraps of random information that desperately need to be sorted, but it's hard to find the time. You've probably tried the brute-force method of computerising your notes: keeping a plain text file (or word processor document) on your desktop, ready at hand to tap in phone numbers, reminders and other tidbits that you need to store in a hurry. This system works fairly well at first, but it soon becomes unwieldy. Sure, it's a slightly better system than playing 'hunt the Post-It Note', and it certainly saves on trees, but there has to be a more elegant solution...

An interesting physical security-focused Linux distribution was upgraded a couple of days ago. Tin Hat Linux reportedly takes a Vista-like five minutes to boot, because its whole filesystem is decrypted and loaded from an optical drive onto a RAMdisk (tmpfs). But after that, it's likely Puppy-fast!