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The suggestion has been made countless times that manufacturers who customize their devices' builds of Android (that is to say, nearly all of them) should have the decency to offer users the option of reverting to a completely clean, stock version of the platform if they so choose. The concept came up at a press lunch featuring Google CEO Eric Schmidt last week, and the dude responded with an interesting explanation for why they don't require that of their partners: "if we were to put those type of restrictions on an open source product, we'd be violating the principle of open source."

For what it's worth, I think HP may want to get into the Linux server business by buying SUSE Linux. The root of the problem isn't that Novell can't find a Linux buyer. That's easy. The real reason why Novell is playing coy with VMware and other potential buy-out suitors is that everyone wants Novell's Linux and no one wants the rest of the company.

Zeya is a streaming music server that brings your music to any computer with a web browser. It reads your music library, lets you browse your files, and streams them on demand. The client runs entirely in the browser using the HTML 5 draft standard technologies— no Flash needed! No Silverlight, no applets, no plugins, no external players.

Recently I copied 60 million files from one Windows file server to another. Tools used to move files from system to another are integrated into every operating system, and there are third party options too. The tasks they perform are so common that we tend to ignore their limits. Many systems administrators are guilty of not knowing exactly where the limits of their file management tools lie - at least until they run up against them.

Your shell script has little to no chance of running securely if it trusts the environment that it runs in, and that environment has been compromised. You can help protect your script from unintended behavior by not trusting items like environment variables. Whenever possible, assume that input from the external environment has been designed to cause your script problems. The PATH variable is a common source of security holes in scripts. Two of the most common issues are the inclusion of the current directory (via the . character) in the path, and using a PATH variable that’s been manipulated by a cracker. The reason that you don’t want the current directory included in the path is that a malicious version of a command like ls could have been placed in your current directory.

One of the sources said that there has been ample interest in the SUSE Linux business from other possible suitors including VMware and CA Inc, and it could fetch a rich multiple. But, the source questioned whether it would be enough to justify the lower value for the remainder of the company. "Look at the numbers: the Linux business is what everyone wants. Once you strip that out the rest is just a dying cow," the source said.

How do you do all this and still give yourself that time at home at night when you need to do those after hours management tasks? Enter Remote Wakeup, otherwise known as Wake on LAN.

Neofonie-owned WeTab GmbH has shipped what appears to be the first MeeGo-based tablet, the 11.6-inch, Intel Atom N450-based WeTab, which is also said to be compatible with Android. Meanwhile, a super-light NFS N-Pad tablet prototype has popped up running Android on an Intel Atom N6xx ("Moorestown") processor.

A no-frills personal document management system can come in handy in many situations. Read on to find out how OpenOffice.org Base can really come into its own…

An easy and cheap way to connect any laptop with a VGA-out port to a TV or home theater receiver. Use your TV as a big computer screen or watch movies. This won't be a big deal to ace multimedia gurus, but it's a medium-big deal to me. It's been on my to-do list for a long time to make a multimedia PC to serve up music and movies to my home theater system. There are all kinds of great media servers in Linux-land, like MythTV, GeeXbox, XMBC, LinuxMCE, and many others. Until I build one of those, I wanted a simple way to play movies from a laptop...

MeeGo is less than a year old. KDE, by contrast, has 14 years of experience in building the Linux desktop. Even with the backing of the world's largest mobile phone and processor vendors, it takes a bold man to turn up at Akademy, KDE's annual global conference, and announce that MeeGo is "redefining the Linux desktop landscape". Valtteri Halla, Nokia's director of MeeGo software, is such a man. He not only set out his vision for how MeeGo will take over the world, but invited KDE along for the ride.

Just because a business moves its systems to the cloud, it doesn't mean less work for system administrators. Though cloud computing puts more resources and tools at a sysadmin's fingertips, there's a still a need for constant monitoring, oversight, and management -- particularly when large numbers of systems are brought online. In this guest post, Jeff McCune, Professional Service Engineer at Puppet Labs, takes an in-depth look at what sysadmins need to know about cloud computing, and how it's changing and shaping the nature of their work.

This document describes how to install a PureFTPd server that uses virtual users from a MySQL database instead of real system users. This is much more performant and allows to have thousands of ftp users on a single machine. In addition to that I will show the use of quota and upload/download bandwidth limits with this setup. Passwords will be stored encrypted as MD5 strings in the database.

Dear Ubuntu 9.04 users, the time has come to say goodbye to the Jaunty Jackalope release of the popular Ubuntu operating system. One month from today, on October 23rd, it reaches end of life.

I wanted to record calls on my Android phone (Nexus one). The easy way would have been to download an app but I like tinkering. And given that I recently bought Tasker, android’s very own swiss knife, I thought I should give it a run. After just an hour I was able to create my very own call recorder (some time went into trial and error with things as this was my first major task with tasker and also some things didn’t work with nexus one, which I will note below). I’ll outline the process to set it up here in as much detail as possible and will also provide the profiles. Please note that I made this setup for nexus one but it should work on pretty much any android phone

This week the Behind KDE interview is with a well known old-timer. He is the guru of kdelibs, but do you know what he does for KDE Sysadmin? Or should I say 'did'? Leave a comment if you get his old timer joke. Meet the one who moved files manually in the CVS era. Meet the guy who developed for KDE before some of you were even born. See how Charm and jazz play an important role in his life. Meet David Faure!

Canonical, promoter of the Ubuntu Linux, is hosting an Ubuntu Hardware Summit for PC partners on Sept. 24. The big news involves uTouch and a dual-boot strategy vs. Windows. The big question: Can Canonical convince more PC and mobile device makers to embrace Ubuntu amid rising competition from Google Android? Here are some best guesses.

Even if you're not a database wonk, you've probably been hearing some talk about this newfangled thing called CouchDB. For one thing, the new Ubuntu desktop uses it for things like the addressbook and Tomboy notes. So what is CouchDB, anyway?

Delicious Morsel have open sourced Feeds, the popular RSS feed reader for webOS. It is now available on GitHub along with WootOn!, another Delicious Morsel app designed to alert users of daily deals.

If you believe everything you read on the Internet, then Canonical, the company behind the Ubuntu distribution, can't do anything right. Part of the reason for this attitude is that, because of Ubuntu's popularity, Canonical is under a scrutiny so intense that every fault is magnified. Another part of the reason is that Canonical is visibly struggling with balancing its commercial efforts with being a corporate citizen of free and open source software (FOSS).