We're taking a little departure this week from our sometimes successful attempt to be non-distro-specific, and looking at a neat little program that runs on Debian and Ubuntu flavors (including Ubuntu-derivatives, like Mint).

Starting with Ubuntu Karmic, Grub2 is used (for clean installs for now), so THIS how-to on recovering the GRUB no longer works for the new GRUB2.

But recovering GRUB2 (after breaking the GRUB2 or installing Windows - which breaks GRUB2, etc.) is just as easy. Here is what you need to do

Note: This tutorial should work for any Linux distribution which uses GRUB2, not just Ubuntu.

SCO was taken to court again in Germany, by one of the companies that got an injunction years ago, Heise is reporting, and now it must pay a fine to the company, Thinking Objects Software GmbH. Three companies took SCO Germany to court back then, and this is one of the three. I'll show you a computer translation first of the headline in Heise.

Ever wish you had your whole desktop on a flash disk? You know what we mean, you take a spreadsheet up to your 'rents, and you realize that they have no program to actually open your spreadsheet with. Or maybe you hop from computer to computer in several offices, and hate the fact that every computer you work on is just different enough to make it difficult to get things done.

There are a lot of funny, preconceived notions about Linux (and Linux users). Some ideas fall in to the realm of FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt).

One undeniable sign of progress among Linux distributions is the proliferation of easy-to-use, graphical package management applications. Tools like yum, Synaptic, and CNR are the rule these days rather than the exception.

Today I've finished installations of two very different operating systems, Vista and Kubuntu. Both are essentially trying to accomplish the same thing, which is to provide desktop users a satisfying and relatively seemless desktop computing experience. Both succeed to a certain degree and both fail in some important areas. The question is why?

Linux is great to use at home. It can be handy at work. It's a great server operating system. But there's one other place that Linux is really worth its weight in gold: public, or semi-public, computers. There's nothing quite as nerve-wracking as seeing someone on a computer you're responsible for, and wondering what exactly they're up to.

Today we're committing blasphemy. Okay, technically we're not. We're not saying that any one system or way of doing things is the only right way. Face it, the only place there was only one right answer to a question was eighth grade math class.