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Plenty of people say Ubuntu isn't ready for prime time. But what they really mean is "I don't want to learn a new operating system." Here's how I convinced my wife to overcome her fear of switching to Ubuntu. Take a look.

Things go wrong. Hard disks fail and whole servers crash. Luckily, many Linux-based distributions are available to help systems administrators handle minor catastrophes. We looked at four of the most portable, all of which fit on a 210MB mini CD -- SliTaz, Parted Magic, GParted, and RIPLinuX. Each of these distributions is easy to use -- just insert the CD or plug in the USB drive on which it's installed, then boot. Each gives you access to a variety of open source tools that you can use to manage disks, partitions, and files and perform diagnostics and network troubleshooting. These distributions provide most of the tools that you might need in an emergency situation.

WebVZ is one of the simplest and most powerful web management tools for OpenVZ. This article explains how you can install WebVZ 2.0 on a Debian Etch system.

A while ago I reviewed 6 GUI clients for IRC, so today I'll continue with the second part with this review of 5 CLI (Command Line Interface) clients.

If you tallied up the strengths and weaknesses of Linux and Windows, which OS would come out ahead? According to Jack Wallen, superiority in security, flexibility, interoperability, community, and command-line power (among other things) put Linux well ahead. See if you agree with his assessment.

Like a diamond, a digital media player or a rare coin, the latest mini-notebooks are good things in small packages. By squeezing a lot of computing power into a very mobile package at a hard-to-beat price, they are turning the established mobile pecking order on its head. Until recently, the smallest and lightest notebooks commanded the highest price tags. Take, for example, Lenovo's ThinkPad X300 and Apple's MacBook Air -- they each weigh about 3 pounds, sell for between $2,500 and $3,000 and are the envy of travelers the world over.

If you're part of a software development team that performs multiple daily builds, then you might replace the term "continuous integration" with "continuous build failure." A company called Electric Cloud may offer a solution. The software production tools maker later this month will begin shipping ElectricCommander 3.0, the latest version of its build automation system that can now check or "preflight" newly modified source code to determine if it will correctly build into an application. Version 3.0 also now integrates with Eclipse and Visual Studio.

Although companies can stick their feet into virtual worlds for a mere tens of thousands of dollars, serious return on investment really requires expenditures in the range of hundreds of thousands of dollars, according to Sibley Verbeck, CEO of The Electric Sheep Company, a virtual worlds software, content and services provider.

Given the prevalence of DirectX nowadays, we tend to forget that 10 years ago an all-out war was being waged between Microsoft and Silicon Graphics in the field of 3D APIs. The two companies were both trying to win over developers, with Microsoft using its financial muscle and SGI relying on its experience and its reputation in the field of real-time 3D.

It's been noted (and I know that it's true) that the spread-system used in the last portion of our Perl script (posted yesterday in our entry regarding maximizing guaranteed matches) was somewhat uneven. The end result, of course, being that your given set-numbers from pool-numbers (3 from 5, 4 from 6, etc) guaranteed that the sets would be included in the generated pools, but (as was noticed by a few people, including myself) the downside (?) ends up being that the front-numbers are more heavily weighted.

Recently I purchased new laptop - A Toshiba A300D. Although my first computer was randomly chosen with absolutely no pre-purchase selection that laptop was very carefully selected among many others. So, I knew that it should work at least at the minimum level with my favourite GNU/Linux distribution - Fedora. To be honest I planed to put on that laptop another distribution - Mandriva. Not because I did not like the last version of Fedora but because I got some kind exhausted of that distribution. I do not know how other users work but I need to change the distro from time to time. I have tried Freespire, Debian for a while, SuSE 9.x for a bit longer, and Mandriva. But I always returned to my favourite one - Fedora.

This three-part "Setting up your own on-demand video site with PHP" series takes you through everything you need to know to create video optimized for the Web, as well as creating a PHP application that will help keep your videos organized and accessible.

Larry Cafiero is sitting in his cluttered office in the Santa Cruz Mountains looking nothing like a revolutionary. Friendly bearded face. Casual blue jeans. Comfy work shirt with the little penguin logo. Yeah, penguin logo. See, Cafiero is a Linux guy. Maybe you know one — or a Linux woman. Maybe you know that to love Linux is to live Linux — that you don't just use free and open-source software, you embrace it and evangelize it. Some more than others.

Researchers at UCSB have demonstrated how ridiculously easy it is to compromise voting machines from Sequoia Voting Systems, which are currently used in 17 states and the District of Columbia.

Although Google Inc. has yet to come up with Mac or Linux editions of its new Chrome browser, CodeWeavers Inc., a company best known for its CrossOver software, has assembled imitations for those operating systems using Google's own source code. St. Paul, Minn.-based CodeWeavers, which sells software that lets Linux or Mac systems run some Windows applications -- notably, Microsoft Office, Internet Explorer, Quicken and a few others -- crafted its CrossOver Chromium browsers using Google's source code and Wine, an open-source implementation of the Windows API for Unix-like operating systems, such as Mac OS X and Linux.

As reported by Gizmodo, Microsoft and OLPC just announced the first official pilot of XO laptops running Microsoft Windows. I am Lionel Laské, President and co-founder of OLPC France and to be honest it's not really a surprise. We hear from months that the agreement between OLPC and Microsoft will be a good way to win new country deployment.

In this second part of my survey I list and briefly describe some of the Java sound and music applications known to work under Linux. Java applications show up in almost every category found atlinux-sound.org and theApplications Database at linuxaudio.org. The scalability of the language is well-demonstrated throughout those pages where one can find everything from highly specialized mini-applications to full-size production environments. Of course I can't cover or even present the entire range of Java soundapps, but this survey should give readers a good idea of Java's potential in the sound and music software domain. Again the presentation is in no special order.

Don't get into IT because you want an air-conditioned office. Get into it because it's your passion. Not sure it's your passion? There are a lot of free tools that'll help you explore.

If the question is "how low can you go" in terms of computer memory, it's all about applications. If you stayed in the Linux console and never ran X, just about anybody could be happy with 32 MB of RAM. It might be hard to actually run Linux or a BSD in 16 MB, but I've heard of Linux distributions that will do it, Damn Small Linux, Tom's RtBt and DeLi Linux among them. But as much as the hard-core users talk about how they stay at the command line all the time, it's hard to get much done strictly in a console when you're a regular person.

This year Software Freedom Day has some outstanding events planned around the world. There is increased support in Government, education and the industry in helping take software freedom to the masses!