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Nothing ever need be a mystery on Linux as it has a large number of excellent utilities for discovering hardware and monitoring hardware health. Here are a handful of good tools for spotting possible hard drive failure, displaying hardware information and monitoring temperatures, fans, voltages, email, music players and more.

Bitcasa is a new cloud service that integrates infinite storage, sync, backup and share into your desktop and across all your devices.

X10 is an open standard for controlling home electrical equipment remotely. It works across home power lines and is extremely low-bandwidth. This communications protocol can control lights, appliances, and other electrical devices, and be used to implement a custom security system. This protocol has the virtue that it is simple to set up, flexible, yet at the same time can create a very sophisticated home control system at a low cost. By using X10 components you can control one company's modules using a different company's controller.

When did Apple get so frightened of Android that it decided to try to sue the competition into the ground instead of competing with them in the marketplace?

Generally, for network storage needs, I would recommend getting a dedicated NAS server, such as the Synology DiskStation DS1511+. However, if your needs are limited to casual usage, such as sharing documents and streaming music and photos, then a router with built-in network storage capability -- one that comes with internal storage or can host an external storage device and shares that with the rest of the network -- fits the bill better.

With ubiquitous Google Maps installed as standard on smartphone OS market leader Android's devices, why anyone would need anything else? Well, the principal benefit of an app like BackCountry Navigator Pro GPS is that it provides offline access to topographic maps, which represent terrain using graphical contour lines, aiding in outdoor-activity navigation.

Linus Torvalds has been saying rude things about GNOME, and Benjamin Otte has been staring into the abyss. GNOME 3 hasn't been the easy success the GNOME developers might have hoped for, and users are said to be leaving for Xfce, LXDE and Cinnamon, all of which replicate in some aspect or another the GNOME 2 user experience.

The little computer that can, the Raspberry Pi, has successfully run the imminent Firefox OS, thanks to the efforts of a Nokia employee named Oleg Romashin. Firefox OS, also and/or formerly known as Boot to Gecko (B2G), is the Mozilla foundation’s attempt at providing an HTML-5 powered OS that will free punters from the tyranny of apps tied to mobile operating systems. The foundation sees the project as not entirely dissimilar to Google’s Chrome OS efforts, but doesn’t feel it is in competition with the text ad giant as it intends Firefox OS as a phone-only play rather than a Microsoft-on-the-lap irritant.

Acquia, the business that provides enterprise support for the open source web content management system, Drupal; purchased spam-blocker Mollom this week and plans to build it out in to a full-fledge platform -- whether for Drupal or anything else.

The Free Software Foundation's "Defective By Design" campaign has introduced a new "DRM Free" label. The idea behind the label is to identify products that do not have DRM protection so that they are easier for consumers to find in stores, and give those products a competitive advantage.

When we talk about mobile operating system, the attention immediately turns to iOS or Android. If you recall, not so long ago, there is also another mobile OS in the market – WebOS, which Hewlett-Packard (HP) used on their own tables and phones and resulted in total market failure. WebOS, by itself, is a great mobile OS to start with, but in the world where iOS and Android dominates with tens of thousands of apps, it pales in comparison. After HP decided to dump their tablets at a cheap price, they have also released the WebOS as an open source project. Today, we will show you how you can run WebOS in your Linux computer, using Virtualbox.

Imagine arriving at a conference where you immediately recognize Linux kernel developers from their annual Linux Kernel Summit photo. You connect with colleagues from other companies but with whom you're working on collaborative, open source projects. A lot of faces in the sessions are familiar and a lot are new. Your session and hallway discussions move beyond talk and you start working on advancing your projects right there at the conference. You might even start a new one. And, at night you leave the laptop in the bag and you enjoy amazing venues and great laughs. This is LinuxCon/CloudOpen.

As usual, the Europeans are relieved to be able to let the United States take the lead in this sordid affair. It lets them have the appearance of having clean hands–even when their culpability is clearly visible. Think about it, the Brits won’t extradite him directly to the U.S., that wouldn’t be cricket, but they will extradite him to be “questioned” in Sweden on an unrelated matter, knowing that as soon as he lands in Stockholm he’ll be turned over to the Yanks, probably right at the airport.

Digium Asterisk, the open source IP PBX and potential Microsoft Lync competitor, will make cloud services and managed services noise in October. That’s good news for partners and customers, many of whom are exploring hosted PBX services and collaboration services. Here's the update.

Well this is unfortunate, but not too surprising. After the Supreme Court rejected medical diagnostic patents in the Mayo case, it vacated the ruling by the Federal Circuit appeals court (CAFC) on gene patents in the Myriad Genetics case, where CAFC had said genes are patentable, and asked it to redo the case in light of the Mayo decision. The ruling came out today, and CAFC more or less repeated what it said in the original ruling. The same panel of three judges effectively argued that Mayo had no real impact on what it said last year, and it was sticking by its decision.

Doctorow framed the question this way: "Computers are everywhere. They are now something we put our whole bodies into---airplanes, cars---and something we put into our bodies---pacemakers, cochlear implants. They HAVE to be trustworthy." Sometimes humans are not so trustworthy, and programs may override you: "I can’t let you do that, Dave." (Reference to the self-protective insane computer Hal in Kubrick’s film "2001." That time the human was more trustworthy than the computer.) Who decides who can override whom?

Get real! It's bad enough that you're going to have to deal with Windows 8 on new PCs, why ask for misery on your old PC?

A new release of the native ZFS file-system module implementation for the Linux kernel (not the FUSE-based ZFS) has been released by the team at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory...

While most surveys and my own observations have found that IT pros remain wary of the cloud and the ability to recover from a cloud data loss, a new survey suggests attitudes could be changing. Is this a trend or an aberration?

There’s no such thing as a homogeneous server environment. Windows administrators must learn basic Linux commands and navigation to support a contemporary network.