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So I spent the best part of the morning troubleshooting. Is it the SATA cable? Try a different one. Boot. Nope, that’s not it. Shut down. Is it the power connector? Try a different one. Boot. Nope, that’s not it. Shut down. Is it the SATA port on the mobo? Swap with the other SATA drive. Boot. Nope, that’s not it. Shut down.

We'll talk about Linux in the motion picture industry, especially its use at the major studios. This community is an upside-down parallel universe where Linux is everywhere, and Windows and Mac are niche operating systems. We'll talk about how the movie Titanic touched off a mass migration to Linux, what Linux tools are used and how. The result is virtually every blockbuster or animated feature in theaters today is made using Linux tools.

I got to SCALE 6x today just in time to hear Ubuntu's Jono Bacon deliver the keynote speech to a standing-room-only audience in the theater at the Los Angeles Airport Westin hotel. The room was packed, with people bunched up in the back and along the sides. His talk focused on the importance and purpose of community in the entire open-source world, not just the Ubuntu project. The point was that the community -- from developers all the way down to users -- will make some year (maybe not this year) "the year of the Linux desktop."

File backups are a key element for every user and on every computer. Whether it be an office setting or a home desktop machine, backups are essential - your hard drive will fail at some point; you will need a backup, and you'll be kicking yourself if you learn this lesson the hard way. Linux users have usually resorted to CRON and Rsync to manage their backups - until now. TimeVault finally offers a complete, easy-to-use, intuitive backup system for Linux.

IPv6 is the future of IP, and it’s a good time to start learning about it. It’s very easy to put an IPv6 address on Linux. IPv6 addresses have 126 bits. This allows for an enormous address space.

What can a Linux geek do for that special someone on Valentine's Day? Create a gift using open source software, of course. One of the easiest and most heartfelt things to do is make a love note with Audacity and put it on your significant other's portable music device or smart phone. The note does not need to say much -- just let her (or him) know that you appreciate and enjoy having her around. Audacity makes this task easy -- just hook up a microphone, click the record button, and off you go. If your valentine doesn't have a music player, you can put the audio track on a CD and slide it into her car stereo for the Valentine's Day morning commute.

One of the projects I'm working on is to migrate a website from an old/outdated content management system I wrote 5+ years ago to something more modern - Drupal One of the challenges here is the listing type pages that provide rows of links to related websites. These links contain the link title, the URL (of course), and a brief description. The alternatives for moving this data was to either copy the rendered table into a single page node, or make use of the Content Construction Kit (CCK) to create custom nodes reflecting the data. Using CCK allows each list entry to be edited directly and actually follows the intended user's way of thinking much better - they DO NOT know HTML at all.

Missed out on the top news this week? Here it is for you: Run Ubuntu and Windows together Ubuntu this week included the Parallels virtualistation software in its partner repository. It;s the first time Ubuntu has included paid-for proprietary software in its software lineup and it is stirring up much debate.

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Custom legend entries and the beginnings of the Mercator map projection (and evidence of exciting other things to come) in Marble. Support for multiple online dictionaries and the start of a vocabulary Plasma applet in Parley. Kross scripting engines (supporting various scripting languages) in Plasma, and the much-anticipated return of the ability to resize the panel. Support for multiple "Picture of the Day" providers in the "Picture Frame" Plasma applet. More work on the redesign (code and visuals) of KWorldClock. Work on theming improvements across KDE games. Image information now displayed in fullscreen mode in Gwenview.

I have started a journey of sorts as I have stated not too long ago. I decided to try multiple distributions in order to see what features were good, what ones were not, and if an all star distribution were to be made, which features would, in my view, make the cut. The first part of what is going to sound disturbing to a few at first, because of the issue of “selling out.” However, allow me to explain.

Every once in awhile, I write for a, shall we say, less specialized audience. Here's a story about this weekend's Southern California Linux Expo aimed at a more general audience. If all goes as planned, this will run in Saturday's print edition of the Los Angeles Daily News.

Get over it. We're never going to see OS/2 open-sourced. If you want to run OS/2 today, the closest you're going to get is Serenity System's eComStation 2.0 RC4. But, it just might be possible for Linux desktop users to get one of OS/2's best features: SOM (System Object Model). IBM, I'm told by developers who should know, still has all of SOM's source code and it all belongs to IBM. It's because IBM doesn't have all the code for OS/2 and some of it belongs to Microsoft that IBM open-sourcing OS/2 has proven to be a futile hope.

So I think I'm "discovering" the NetBSD live CD, but I learn that Distrowatch announced the damn thing in 2006. All I can say is that I'm very, very impressed. It's NetBSD, it boots on my temperamental test box, and not only does it have X, it has a full KDE desktop with tons of applications -- the full KOffice, Konqueror, Firefox, Abiword, K3b, Krita, the GIMP, Inkscape, JuK, XMMS, -- hell, just say it's got a full KDE 3.5.4 setup and then some, and NetBSD autoconfigured for my monitor (with the VESA option) and looks absolutely gorgeous.

In a weblog on CNet, Don Reisinger asks Is Linus Torvalds even speaking for Linux anymore? The question reminds me of a famous retort by Charles Babbage. I’m sure you can find it, and it’s immaterial. What Mr. Reisinger said is more important..

Back in the day, Microsoft was the new kid on the block when it came to mobile devices like PDAs, munching up Palm's market share and tweaking the interest of application providers already familiar with Windows and Microsoft's applications. Today, the descendants of Microsoft's Windows CE, Windows Mobile and Smartphone, are the ones getting left behind as Apple's iPhone proves one of the main catalysts for action in the mobile sector.

The Wall Street Journal reported this morning that EU regulators have announced a third investigation into Microsoft's conduct on the desktop. This time around, the EU is going to investigate the long string of complaints about what happened during last year's attempt by Microsoft to achieve adoption for OOXML.

Try as they might, Microsoft just can't seem to put in all the features and applications their users yearn for. Ironically, this is what drives the average Linux user: choice.

Look under /pub/OpenBSD/doc/obsd-faq.pdf and /pub/OpenBSD/doc/obsd-faq.txt on your nearest FTP mirror. The thing's 227 pages long in PDF form. The 998-page FreeBSD Handbook, compressed in its various forms (including PDF, Postscript, text and RTF), can be found under /pub/FreeBSD/doc/handbook from your local FTP mirror. It's especially nice to be told to RTMF when the manual in question is as good as these two. And these are free books.

GnuCash is a personal finance and accounting application created to keep you crazy organized. It can do simple things like recording expenses and take care of register transactions, but it can also handle tracking bank accounts, income, and a slew of financial instruments and derivatives.

The VAR Guy is skipping Disneyland this weekend and keeping a close eye on the Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE), which runs February 8-10 at the Westin Los Angeles. Here are five trends and themes The VAR Guy will be tracking at the event.