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You turn on your trusty old Linux box, and things are going well as you pass through the boot loader, until the disk check reveals that your hard drive partition table is corrupt, and you are unable to access your machine. You need a good rescue disk — and the best way to get one is to create your own.

Release 5.0.0 is available for download. "Slax" is updated to version 6.1.2 (customized for better user experience), "System Rescue CD" is updated to version 1.3.1, "Puppy Linux" is updated to version 4.3.1, "Parted Magic" is updated to version 4.5 and "Tiny Core" is updated to version 2.4.1. New feature has been added: "boot.kernel.org" (BKO) is available as boot option. This allows you to boot your PC from remote location (internet). Visit http://boot.kernel.org for more information.

With its open source release Thursday of its Closure JavaScript tools, Google (GOOG) is starting to suggest that it may eventually become a good open source citizen. The newly released tools include a JavaScript compiler, a very broad JavaScript class library, and Java/JavaScript-friendly templates. All are released under the Apache 2.0 license, a very permissive license that essentially lets outsiders do whatever they want (rather than a viral or semi-viral license like EPL or LGPL).

A Boston-based startup named Litl is taking a big risk: they're betting people will go for a netbook that sports a Linux-based OS and focuses on Web-/network-based productivity (Facebook, Twitter, etc.). The risk is in the pricetag: $700 -- almost twice the price of computers that can do twice as much. Is there a market for this?

Android 2.0 (formerly codenamed 'Éclair') is the latest evolution of the mobile OS developed by Google and the Open Handset Alliance. This version is a chunky upgrade, superceding the current Android 1.6 software (dubbed 'Donut'), which was actually considered "a minor platform release". The first phone to feature Android 2.0 will be Motorola's comeback phone, the DROID (aka the dull-sounding Milestone in Europe).

Novell and Microsoft have each filed summary judgment motions in the antitrust litigation about WordPerfect that Novell brought against Microsoft. In addition, we find out what happened regarding the Bill Gates deposition. And neither party can find certain documents that might be in the Comes collection. I wonder if you can?

One Laptop per Child chairman Nicholas Negroponte told Xconomy that OLPC is prepping an ARM-based version 1.75 of its XO netbook while planning to release a "paper-thin" version 3.0 in 2012. Meanwhile, the Internet Archive is providing OLPC users with 1.6 million e-books, says the nonprofit organization.

This column is a bit premature because I haven't had time to set things up and test them yet. But I'm excited about getting started, so here are some preliminary notes on multi-track recording in Linux using a Firewire device. I scored a nice deal on a Focusrite Saffire Pro 26 Firewire recording interface. My studio PC does not have Firewire so I also bought a SIIG PCI Firewire 400 card and a 6-pin to 6-pin cable. Focusrite is a good supporter of the FFADO project, which writes Linux drivers for Firewire recording devices.

Prominent open source personalities presented a host of information about current and future developments in Linux at the Linux-Kongress 2009 conference. This time, filesystems were discussed in several presentations. Among the topics were the advantages of Ext4 and Btrfs, fast Ext4 filesystem checks, and kernel and userspace tricks for minimising the time-consuming movements of read/write heads, all of which can speed up some tasks by several orders of magnitude!

Red Hat execs explain why Linux vendor's Linux virtualization management solution runs only on Microsoft's rival OS. Andy Cathrow, product marketing manager for Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, told InternetNews.com. "We spent a lot of time talking to customers to see what their view was on this and I think with the possible exception of Red Hat, everyone has some Windows in their datacenter."

“Sita Sings The Blues” by self-taught animator Nina Paley, may be the first feature-length animated film released under a free license (the Creative Commons By-SA). Presented through a variety of animation styles and narrative tones, it fuses apparently disparate ideas and sources into a unified whole. An ancient Hindu epic, The Ramayana, is retold largely through the songs of a 1920s American singer, Annette Hanshaw. The mode of storytelling also mirrors aspects of the world-wide collaborative potential of twenty-first century art, reflected also in the film’s real life controversies, including copyright entanglements and censorship concerns. Read the full article at Freesoftware Magazine.

Please enjoy 9 free Linux distributions. Free means freedom. All 9 of these contain only free software and have the blessing of the FSF.

It's been more than a month since I last wrote about the CodePlex Foundation, the new open source initiative announced by Microsoft in early September. While things were pretty quiet at the Foundation site for some time, that changed on October 21, when the Foundation posted its new Project Acceptance and Operation Guidelines, a key deliverable that gives insight into a variety of aspects of the Foundation's developing purpose and philosophy. 

This is a Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 on Linux with Wine howto. This guide shows you how to install and run IE 8 on Linux with wine. The guide also has code samples and screenshots and step by step instructions. Windows Internet Explorer 8 is the latest web browser developed by Microsoft in the long running Internet Explorer browser series.

New Mandriva Linux release introduces Smart Desktop. Ubuntu Linux may get the majority of attention from Linux watchers but there are many good alternatives available. One of those is Mandriva Linux, a version of Linux formerly known as Mandrake and long considered one of the most user-friendly of Linux versions. And now, just a week after the release of Ubuntu 9.10, Mandriva has released Mandriva Linux 2010, its newest and most feature-packed release to date.

RepRap (replicating Rapid-prototyper) is a 3D printer and it is impeccably free and open source under both the GPL and the Creative Commons Licence. It’s early days but the implications and the promise are potentially enormous in their own right — but the fact that it is resolutely not proprietary is what caught my attention. Read the full article at Freesoftware Magazine.

The Subversion version control system is now part of the Apache Software Foundation. The project cofinanced by Collabnet and the Apache Foundation announced at ApacheCon in Oakland CA that Subversion is officially to become an Apache project.

Moblin version 2.1 is available for download. This tiny Linux edition is suitable for netbooks & nettops as anounced by the Moblin project steering committee.

We've seen how to check Gmail using the terminal (shell) in Linux and Mac but how about sending emails from a shell? This is actually pretty easy, here's what you have to do:

The sheer amount of information that Google has on us across its properties can be daunting. The new Dashboard tool is a step toward letting us see what they have.