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Recently, I blogged that every good IT technician really needs Linux in their toolkit – even if you're strictly a Windows shop. Here are more good reasons why a bootable Linux CD can really save your bacon including indispensable tools you must have.

This guide explains how you can set up an AoE target and an AoE initiator (client), both running Debian Lenny. AoE stands for "ATA over Ethernet" and is a storage area network (SAN) protocol which allows AoE initiators to use storage devices on the (remote) AoE target using normal ethernet cabling. "Remote" in this case means "inside the same LAN" because AoE is not routable outside a LAN (this is a major difference compared to iSCSI). To the AoE initiator, the remote storage looks like a normal, locally-attached hard drive.

There are many, many Linux distributions, and a lot of unique reasons to like them. Read on to see which open-source operating systems inspired our readers to provide our biggest Hive Five response to date. In the call for contenders, we asked not only which Linux distribution was your favorite, but a note on why, with the hope that readers new to Linux would learn a thing or two. You responded in force. This was the most popular Hive Five to date, with over 800 votes and many helpful comments.

During the 1970s, the Palo Alto Research Center was the hotspot for computer technology, with various important technological advances in computing coming from these Xerox labs. One of those advances was a humble cable and associated protocols: ethernet was born. El Reg interviewed one of the inventors and the driving force behind ethernet, Bob Metcalfe.

The netward program, a simple hey why are you connecting to that program has entered beta stage. The program uses libpcap to detect when a port should not be accessed and logs. Currently plans for the program are to add one more tweak to cut down on noise for admins and possibly add an event handler script.

15th birthday Linux. For a teenager, you're pretty well traveled. In fact, you've gone to some pretty weird-arse places. Places I probably wouldn't go myself, and not just for sanitary reasons.

Thanks to a message to the grassroots mailing-list by Yama I discovered hat OLPC is looking for people for the following job opportunities which are also an indication of where OLPC might be heading in the forseeable future..

It's nearly 15 years since the first version of the Linux kernel, and our friends over at TuxRadar have posted the original comp.os.linux.announce announcement. On 14 Mar 1994 at 12:51:16 GMT, Linus Torvalds posted the message to announce Linux 1.0. It was late, though Torvalds shrugged this off. "Almost on time (being just two years late is peanuts in the OS industry), and better than ever."

I used to be one of PCLinuxOS' fans and I especially enjoyed the GNOME flavor so hearing that the team was ready to finally launch a new version sparkled a lot of interest in me. And what better way to express that interest than sharing my first impressions on this popular distribution? Being a GNOME person I went straight to the PCLOS GNOME page and got the 2009.1 ISO from there. 694 MegaBytes later and I was ready to dive into this new experience.

The Jaiku developers have announced that Jaiku is now being served from the Google App Engine, which is the first step at making it "a federated, open source microblogging platform." The customisable platform is a part of Google and is maintained by volunteer Google engineers in their spare time.

With "Linux's dirty little secret: Uninstall" professional journalism has reached another, unprecedented low. I'm a customer and I expect nothing less than high quality articles of knowledgeable professionals. For this, I've always liked German magazines, which I consider to be the best in the world. That is in sharp contrast with David Ramel, who considers himself to be the new Hunter S. Thompson. Mr. Ramel, let me remind you that there is something like ethics.

Someone on the Ubuntu forums started an interesting thread today asking, “Can you manage to use only free software on your pc?“ It got me thinking about my dependency on proprietary software, and whether I’d ever really be able to get it out of my life entirely. I use three computers (in the narrow sense of the word, which excludes my cell phone) on a semi-daily basis: a desktop at home, an old Dell laptop that I use for taking notes in the library and a workstation in my employer’s office. All of these machines run Ubuntu, but there are bits and pieces of closed-source code tacked on. Here’s a breakdown of the proprietary components.

In response to a painful article I read, I’d like to touch the topic of a handy and easy way to install programs under Linux. First and the highest accusation to the current status quo is the impossibility to install the binary package on any Linux distribution, enabling, for example, the possibility to send a file to a friend, for a similar deployment, and the possibility to do a clean uninstallation of all dependencies. The other accusation states that “Linux has become a developers’ system, and not a system for the people.

When I first came across Gumstix, my jaw dropped. Gumstix are fully functional computer motherboards, the size of a gumstick or smaller, that run Linux. The latest in the Gumstix line, the Overo Earth, pushes the boundaries of ultra small computers -- and kicks some serious butt doing it.

A February survey of IT managers by IDC indicated that hard times are accelerating the adoption of Linux. The open source operating system will emerge from the recession in a stronger data center position than before, concluded an IDC white paper. Sixty-five percent of the 330 respondents said they plan to increase Linux server workloads by 10% or more this year. Sixty-three percent said they will increase their use of Linux on the desktop by more than 10% this year, although such an increase would still probably represent a miniscule share of all desktops. Forty-nine percent said they expect Linux will be their primary server platform within five years.

It is interesting that a time has actually come to pass that a lot of Unix users do not know of other "desktops" outside of a visual tour of older (yet still oft used) window managers and how they were built up from one to the next to reach the first X windows environment.

Finally, after almost two years in the making, the latest version of PCLinuxOS has been unleashed. Although released without much fanfare, I was excited enough to download PCLinuxOS 2009 immediately after it is available. I was able to test drive PCLOS 2009, took some screenshots for you all to see, and wrote my first impressions about this latest version which you will about to read later on. But before anything else, allow me to introduce PCLinuxOS to some of our new-to-Linux readers.

The repository system is a great strength of open-source operating systems, but some people want the latest-and-greatest of a particular application while keeping the core system unchanged. There is also the situation where non-free applications aren't available from within the standard repositories. In these two cases, adding outside repos can help you get the functionality you want.

There are growing concerns in the open source community that has many Linux developers worried. And some system integrators feel the same way. Overall, technical support and licensing policies managing many open source projects are an afterthought, and this is exactly what has the Linux and open source community worried. Some say it's time for some major changes in the way support and FOSS (free and open source software) licensing are managed in the enterprise segment.

While you can create and save documents in the OpenDocument format using OpenOffice.org, KWord, or AbiWord, there are other ways to generate ODF files.