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Mary, the daughter of a friend is in college: her Windows XP laptop constantly reboots and, we suspect, has a bad hard drive. The system will boot a live CD (Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala Desktop), and data on the hard drive can be read. During boot, the live CD identifies disk errors and tries unsuccessfully to repair them.

The rapid advance of the cloud, along with other existing Internet-based services, into the business space has highlighted the need for trust in the underlying protocols that provide the driving force behind the Internet. Some are now arguing that a secure software-based DNS signing system is essential if business is to maximise the potential of the cloud.

Me and Xorg. It's a long, dramatic tale. OK, it's not so much me and Xorg as it is my Intel 830m graphics chip and Xorg, or more specifically my Intel 82830 CGC and Xorg. In Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx) Alpha 2, which I've been testing with a live DVD, there are two ways to boot the disc and get actual video on systems with this graphics chip.

The Morevna Project aims to create an animated film in a modern anime-style retelling a very old Russian folktale known as “Marya Morevna”. It’s a free culture production project pushing the envelope in several ways — entirely using free software tools and releasing under the free Creative Commons Attribution license. The project is purely community-based, without any foundation funding, so they can probably use your help. Joining could be a terrific learning opportunity, whether your interest is in literature, music, animation, or software development. Read the full article at Freesoftware Magazine.

Firefox too mainstream for ya? Bored with Chrome or Opera? Linux users with a wandering eye can find plenty of browser alternatives, from the super-useful to niche browsers that offer moderate improvements on existing browsers like Firefox. We look at some of the “alternative” browsers on Linux that we’ve found interesting and useful over the years.

The OpenOffice team have made version 3.2 of the open source office suite for Windows, Mac OS, Linux and Solaris available to download. It offers numerous enhancements over its predecessor which offer both stability and speed benefits. Writer and Calc, for example, should now start twice as fast as in version 3.1.1.

LottaNZB 0.5.3 Usenet client for Linux is released. It both features some new bells and whistles, making the application ready for future releases of your favorite GNU/Linux distribution, but also includes numerous bug fixes.

Google Buzz only came out yesterday, but it's taking a lot of hits around the internet from privacy issues to interface complaints. But the open aspect of it could lead to interesting third party implementations.

Mozilla Messaging is looking forward to a big year in 2010 including Thunderbird 3.1 and figuring out how to make the project financially sustainable. Making Thunderbird better is the easier part. Figuring out how to make money as a project is another story entirely.

Even with all of the high quality software available, sometimes you just have to break down and write a custom application, and usually you don't have a lot of time to devote to it. This is the situation I found myself in when my wife started a new business and needed a simple means of tracking sales leads. To her credit, she realized that she couldn't simply use a spreadsheet and needed a database application. So I decided that I'd see just how involved it would be to write an application with Open Office's database program, known as Base.

Few days ago Ubuntu announced that there is a serious security issue in the kernel from version 6.06, 8.04, 8.10, 9.04 and 9.10 . 7.xx versions are not affected. Canonical has been recommended as a solution to update the kernel of its various versions.Today i show you how to upgrade the kernel the safe way in Ubuntu and LinuxMint. I tested this tutorial on Ubuntu 9.10 karmic koala and LinuxMint 8 helena .

Red Hat released the first beta of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5.5, providing memory allocation enhancements to the KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine) hypervisor. RHEL 5.5 also introduces new storage and WiFi drivers, and supports new AMD, IBM, and Intel processors, says the company.

The major derivatives of Ubuntu are well known, but what about the others? Just because they aren’t as popular doesn’t mean they don’t have something to offer! We introduce five of the least known, yet simply outstanding distributions.

Let's get one thing straight. We don't like the term cloud computing any more than you do. Of course, Richard Stallman doesn't like when we call it Linux rather than GNU/Linux. He's gotta live with Linux. And, well, we've gotta live with cloud computing. It's not going away.

GRUB2 has been a long time coming, and is finding its way into users' hands mainly via Ubuntu 9.10. Is it better than legacy GRUB? Should you upgrade? Akkana Peck guides through the mazy paths of GRUB2 in this series.

Ksplice has launched a subscription service that updates Linux servers without rebooting. Based on an MIT-bred utility that has been considered for merging into the Linux mainline kernel, Ksplice Uptrack is claimed to reduce costly downtime, while also speeding installation of security patches and other upgrades.

On the application platform side of the cloud, Red Hat is developing the BoxGrinder project. JBoss Fellow Bob McWhirter explained during the forum that one of the goals of BoxGrinder is to make is easy to grind out server configurations for a variety of virtualization fabrics.

The MBR or Master Boot Record is an area at the beginning of your hard drive. It is very important because it contains the partition table. There are also routine boot whose goal is to load the operating system. Backup your MBR does not really interest. Unless you intend to perform manipulations risky on your hard drive or install a new Boot Loader (Grub, Lilo ...) for examples.

Once again, the British Library is working closely with Microsoft to promote proprietary technologies instead of open ones - giving away open source code that requires Windows Server, SQL Server .NET Framework and SharePoint to work. Shouldn't publicly-funded libraries be helping to spread knowledge, not locking it down?

This guide explains how you can run virtual machines with Sun VirtualBox 3.1.x on a headless OpenSUSE 11.2 server. Normally you use the VirtualBox GUI to manage your virtual machines, but a server does not have a desktop environment. Fortunately, VirtualBox comes with a tool called VBoxHeadless that allows you to connect to the virtual machines over a remote desktop connection, so there's no need for the VirtualBox GUI.