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I have been impressed with the way that popular Linux distros like Ubuntu have improved with each new release; these days, Linux is a great choice for technically sophisticated users who don’t mind being far, far out of the mainstream. But for people who don’t have the time or the inclination to make fundamental changes, it’s a nonstarter.

rsnapshot is a filesystem backup utility based on rsync. Using rsnapshot, it is possible to take snapshots of your filesystems at different points in time. Using hard links, rsnapshot creates the illusion of multiple full backups, while only taking up the space of one full backup plus differences. When coupled with ssh, it is possible to take snapshots of remote filesystems as well.

Although the Productivity Sauce blog is all about, well, productivity, I'm willing to make an exception and mention the newly released Puppy Linux 4.1. I've been using this lightweight Linux distro on my ASUS Eee PC 701 for quite some time, and it helped me to be productive wherever I went.

There's never a dull moment for those of us lucky enough to be part of the technology industry, and we here at LinuxInsider are just as prone as the next tech enthusiasts to get caught up in the excitement of new innovations and ideas. Take cloud computing. It's a concept that has been grabbing an increasing portion of the digital ink on our pages and elsewhere.

Do people who pay $299 to $399 for a Linux notebook suffer greater levels of buyer’s remorse compared to those buying Windows machines?

No need to introduce Fedora as they are usually in the top 5 at http://distrowatch.com. Fedora always stay current with the newest open source packages and usually at the forefront of the Linux Community. So with no further delay..... Check these Fedora 10 Beta ScreenShots.

While the default commands allow you to perform quite a few actions, the extensible and open nature of Ubiquity means that you can easily expand its functionality by installing additional scripts that add new commands. There are dozens of Ubiquity scripts floating on the Web, but here are a few that you might find particularly useful.

CEO Rusty Harris revealed MontaVista's role developing the quick-booting, ARM-based processor subsystem expected to ship this year in select Dell laptop models. The "Latitude ON" feature aims to give enterprise laptop users instant boot-up and access to select applications, with multi-day battery lifetimes.

If there's one thing that's never affected by economic downturn, it's the mobile handset market. This phenomenon is most evident at the underground parties and dive bars in San Francisco, where it is a well known yet unspoken tradition that in any given group of hipsters, the one with the cheapest phone must always buy the first pitcher of Pabst Blue Ribbon.

Everyone needs to back up their computers, but when you have machines running on different platforms and different operating systems, it can be annoying to have to learn several interfaces. Areca and plan/b are two Java-based backup solutions that can run on any platform, including Linux, Windows, and Unix. Although maintenance has been discontinued for plan/b, both apps are worth a look.

Like DD-WRT and OpenWRT, Tomato is an excellent Linux-based replacement for your stock WRT54G wireless router family firmware. Unlike DD-WRT and OpenWRT, it presents a well-organized interface that appeals to both novices and advanced users.

At the Linux Plumbers Conference Thursday, Arjan van de Ven, Linux developer at Intel and author of PowerTOP, and Auke Kok, another Linux developer at Intel's Open Source Technology Center, demonstrated a Linux system booting in five seconds. The hardware was an Asus EEE PC, which has solid-state storage, and the two developers beat the five second mark with two software loads: one modified Fedora and one modified Moblin. They had to hold up the EEE PC for the audience, since the time required to finish booting was less than the time needed for the projector to sync.

Maintaining filesystems can be a real administration burden. Over time you might start getting multiple copies of the same file, soft links that point to files that no longer exist, temporary files that have been hanging around longer than they should, and binaries that have been installed and not had their debugging information stripped out. fslint can help you find these troublesome files so you can clean up your filesystem. Packages for fslint are available in Ubuntu Hardy universe and in the Fedora 9 repositories. There are currently no packages for openSUSE. I built it from source using version 2.28 of fslint on a 32-bit Fedora 9 machine. fslint is written in Python and uses GTK+2 and libglade2, so you'll need these and the Python bindings for them installed first.

Red Hat on Thursday introduced what it called the first fully integrated, Linux-based, high-performance-computing platform, claiming to undercut a similar Windows-based system recently introduced by Microsoft. The Red Hat HPC Solution is an update of a product of the same name that was introduced in November 2007. That product had more limited options for hardware and support, and was not available outside the United States. The new version is the first to be available directly through the Red Hat Network and to be backed by Red Hat's own international customer-support services.

Impress your friends with fancy alternative foreign words for the banal English ones you use everyday ;) Today's Linux/Unix bash shell script is follow-up in our (must-almost-be-ending) series of posts on Linux and Unix Bash shell scripts to keep you from having to switch to your browser ;) The last one we did was an Updated World Weather Checker. To keep up with this list of scripts that keeps on growing, check out our other bash script posts on spewing out famous quotations on pretty much any subject, doing encyclopedia lookups, accessing the online Thesaurus, translating between different languages and, of course, using the online dictionary.

In the Phoronix Test Suite 1.2 "Malvik" release our flagship Linux benchmarking software was brought to OpenSolaris and FreeBSD. With Phoronix Test Suite 1.4 "Orkdal", to be officially released later this year, we are now extending our test support to include Apple's Mac OS X operating system. In Phoronix Test Suite 1.4 Alpha 2 that was released this morning there is full support for Mac OS X within this open-source benchmarking framework and there are about three dozen tests that will run "out of the box" in this environment. We believe this is now the most comprehensive benchmarking platform for Mac OS X and it allows real-world test results to be compared from Linux, OpenSolaris, and FreeBSD.

The open-source implementation of Microsoft's .NET is due to hit its second release today, with many .NET 3.5 features and a few notable exceptions. Mono 2.0 will be announced today a year and a half later than expected but - thanks to that delay - it features an open-source version of C# 3.0 and Language Integrated Query (LINQ). Mono lets you build and run .NET-style desktop and server applications on Linux, OS X and Solaris in addition to Windows.

Microsoft chief Steve Ballmer was in Oslo and visited Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg, who was quick to hail Microsoft's move. Stoltenberg claimed that Microsoft's selection of Norway signaled major recognition of Norway's search technology expertise. He called it "a fantastic thing," and said Microsoft's commitment to Norway would also stimulate and strengthen local competence.

The other day I had to come up with a way to transfer a Solaris Express nv97 DVD 3G image to remote locations while not using the network. The reason for this is, I needed to perform a LiveUpgrade on over 700 boxes and each being at a different locations. So I said to myself I guess I can put this image on a custom LiveDVD... But then I said to myself, which Linux LiveCD/DVD distro will I use???? It has to be small enough so that I can fit the Solaris Express nv97 image as well as the LiveCD Image.

LXer Feature: 05-Oct-2008

Here are the most prominent stories that hit the LXer Newswire this past week all gathered together for your reading pleasure. Gentoo looks to restructure, a look at who really is contributing to Linux development, is gOS better that Ubuntu? And last but not least we celebrate the birthday of the Linux Kernel as it turns 17.