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Adding a second (or third or more!) hard drive to your computer is a great way to, well, give your computer more disk space. Ok, the concept is pretty logical but the process to make it work needs some explanation. Here’s what to do, plus one thing the Linux filesystem does brilliantly which Windows can’t do at all.

"Put a price tag on the Freedomware experience. Brand it in various interesting ways and market it in such a way for it to appear as a clear answer to the questions they actually ARE asking, the things that they actually ARE looking for."

Some pundits say Oracle could go shopping for Red Hat because Red Hat shares are trading near a 52-week low. But The VAR Guy hopes it doesn't happen. Here's why.

Like files, processes are fundamental to any UNIX® operating system. Processes are live entities executing the instructions of an executable file. Apart from executing its instructions, a process might be engaged in managing open files, processor context, address space, and data related to the program, among other things. The Linux kernel keeps complete information about a process in a process descriptor defined as struct task_struct. You can see the various fields of struct task_struct in the Linux kernel source file include/linux/sched.h.

We've written about GIMP, the outstanding open source graphics program originally developed at U.C. Berkeley, several times before. The application has had a robust community of developers behind it for years, and now a new version 2.6 is downloadable. Here's what's under the hood in the update, including a whole slew of interface enhancements.

An increasing number of computer users are turning to online applications instead of ones on their desktop. It started with webmail and has moved to productivity/office tools. With the emergence of online applications that have no desktop equivalent, and mobile devices that are browsers in your pocket, things are looking up. But what about free software? If the software we are using is not run on the computer on our desk/lap/hand what does the licence matter? For some time now I’ve been reading predictions where the browser will be the computer. Does this future have space for free software? Ryan Cartwright raises a very timely question about the significance of software licences in an era of online applications. You can read the full article at Freesoftware Magazine.

Windows, whether XP or Vista, is home to all the major instant messenger (IM) clients, and for things like Skype, unquestionably has the best versions. But if you’re hankering to talk to multiple friends on multiple IM systems at the same time, and you want some open source goodness without having to go through the pain of learning Linux, try Pidgin for Windows instead – the open source program that lets you talk freely.

The computer of the future is almost here. It's a small handheld device with some pretty good built-in muscle and storage, and that depends on the network for most of its functionality. But it won't really be practical until the keyboard goes away and we can talk to our computers.

No Linux distribution can bundle every package that users might want, so most distros host software repositories from which users can download and install additional applications. Since 2006 Slackbuilds.org has served as a high-quality repository for Slackware users, but using it requires several steps and switching between a Web browser and a virtual terminal. Sbopkg is a new ncurses-based utility that helps users build packages from SlackBuilds.org and seamlessly integrates the repository with the operating system. Slackbuilds.org is closest thing available to an official Slackware repository. It is administered by people on the Slackware development team and recommended by Slackware's maintainer, Patrick Volkerding, in the Slackware release notes. Sbopkg automates and streamlines the process of working with Slackbuilds.org to build packages.

A few years ago I stumbled upon the efforts of the Victoria Linux Users Group. They are an active, involved group, but not particularly unlike any other LUG. I was pointed in the direction of their Linux in Victoria brochure. Yes, its date of publication was 1997. What makes this brochure different is that it is open. Perhaps this is less impressive in light of the advent of wikis, but the purpose and intent of the brochure is still remarkable, and well worth expanding upon.

The Linux Foundation (LF) announced a "LinuxCon" conference that will be open to end-users. Set for September 2009 in Portland, Ore., LinuxCon will co-locate with the annual Linux Plumbers Conference (LPC), says the group. The LinuxCon announcement follows up on The LF's first end-user event, which is scheduled to take place on October 13-14 in New York City. This Linux Foundation End User Collaboration Summit offers an opportunity for "sophisticated" end users to "learn and interact with leaders from within the Linux community, including the highest level maintainers and developers," said the non-profit organization.

The Spread Linux platform is officially launched! The idea is to provide a platform for people who are interested in Linux marketing. Our target is to spread the word to increase the market share of Linux. We invite you to share your marketing ideas. With the newest Linux distributions it's very easy to install Linux even for people who have no deep computer knowledge. Linux is ready for the desktop!

The developers from Linux-gamers.net launched a new version of their Linux games-focused live distribution. New arrivals included action games Teeworlds 0.4.3, Openarena 0.8.0 and World of Padman 1.2. Also released was a rudimentary installation assistant that for the first time, will permanently anchor the contents of the DVD to the mother board.

In a recent independent test, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5 Advanced Platform trumped all other operating systems that process more than 1 million transactions per minute -- and at 22% lower cost than its next closest competitor. The San Francisco-based Transaction Processing Performance Council (TPC), which performs benchmark tests of database transactions, validated Red Hat's processing of 1.2 million transactions per minute on an IBM System x 3950M2 with the new Intel X7460 Xeon processor.

The tech sector is experiencing a crash -- not of stock prices, which rebounded somewhat on Wall Street on Tuesday -- but in its ability to take new companies public. So far this year, there have been just six venture-backed initial public offerings; last year, there were 86, according to the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA). The recent collapse of investment banks Lehman Brothers Holdings and Bear Stearns Cos. is exacerbating the problem.

In just over a week’s time, government officials and representative from around the globe will gather in South Africa for the second annual Open Document Format (ODF) workshop. The workshop, which will be held in Pretoria from 9-10 October, is aimed at governments that are in the process of migrating to ODF as a standard or have done so already.

Online office suites are attractive for organizations with modest document processing needs, especially due to their low cost (read: free). But if you don't like the idea of storing your documents outside your network, try OpenGoo. It's an online office suite that installs on your local network and allows users to collaborate with others both inside and outside the network. The open source software, still under active development, is an easy to install and use, and if it's not quite ready for real-world large-scale deployment, it's getting there fast.

ICANN, IANA, IETF, ISOC, IAB, IRTF, SRS, NSI, RIR, NSO-- who or what are these, and what do they have to with what you can do with the Internet? Charlie Schluting explains the roles of the many organizations and governing bodies that operate behind the scenes.

The Uncomplicated Firewall (UFW) is a new tool from Ubuntu whose goal is to make configuration of the built-in Linux packet filter less complicated and more secure for novice users. You must run UFW commands as root, so in Ubuntu, you must preface them with the sudo command. With UFW, enabling and disabling packet filtering is a simple matter of issuing the sudo ufw enable and sudo ufw disable commands. You set the default policy for filtering packets by running the sudo ufw default command and passing the allow or deny argument, depending on what you want to achieve. If you issue the sudo ufw default allow command, all incoming packets will be allowed by default, creating a very unsecure packet filter but giving you the broadest range of allowed services. The command sudo ufw default deny will block all incoming packets, requiring that you allow specific services to pass the packet filter.

Untangle, which develops open source security solutions, has a rather interesting pitch for VARs and small businesses. It involves a simple USB stick known as the Silver Bullet. Here’s the scoop.