I pulled the 30 GB hard drive from the $15 Laptop today, swapped in the original 3 GB drive (which wasn't bootable with its original Windows 98 install) and decided to throw distros at it.

For Window users switching to Linux or Ubuntu, performing simple tasks can be a challenge. One simple task such as checking free and used hard drive disk space on Ubuntu, is easy using the graphical utility Disk Usage Analyzer or from a Terminal window using the command df.

This is a devils advocate post in response to my original post "Reasons your parents should use Linux". Though my original post intended to explain 5 reasons you should switch your parents to Linux, this post will address what many people have commented on in the past few days. 5 reasons why you should NOT switch your parents to Linux.

In Unix environments there are two ways to link a file. The first being hard-linking. Hardlinking is different than symlinks in the fact that if you remove the original file that the hardlink points to, the link itself can still show you the content of the original file. Where as a symlink is useless without the original file (think “shortcuts” in Windows).

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.

GSmartControl is a really useful Linux app to check the health of your hard disk drive. GSmartControl is basically a graphical user interface for smartctl, which is a tool for querying and controlling SMART (Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology) data on modern hard disk drives. Only ATA drives including both PATA and SATA are supported for now.

Many people leave their computers on around the clock. This usually implies that all the attached hard disks are always spinning. Constantly spinning up a hard disk normally increases the chances of drive failure. When a disk is not powered it should last longer than if it was spinning.

...one of the computers ran out of hard drive space. So I had a bigger hard drive with four times the disk space handy, and swapped them. The steps:

Adding a second (or third or more!) hard drive to your computer is a great way to, well, give your computer more disk space. Ok, the concept is pretty logical but the process to make it work needs some explanation. Here’s what to do, plus one thing the Linux filesystem does brilliantly which Windows can’t do at all.