Selling businesses on the benefits of Linux has been a tough proposition for many years. Common reasons cited for not moving to the open-source operating system include system complexity, lack of in-house IT skills and a shortage of business applications.

We, the undersigned Linux kernel developers, consider any closed-source Linux kernel module or driver to be harmful and undesirable. We have repeatedly found them to be detrimental to Linux users, businesses, and the greater Linux ecosystem.

Over the weekend, I converted my laptop to use the ext4 filesystem. So far so good! So far I’ve found one bug as a result of my using ext4 in production (if delayed allocation is enabled, i_blocks doesn’t get updated until the block allocation takes place, so files can appear to have 0k blocksize right after they are created, which is confusing/unfortunate), but nothing super serious yet.

A few days ago I reviewed BasKet, the wonderful KDE application for taking notes, so today I decided upon Tomboy, which is an application for GNOME.

Google is part of a group of tech heavyweights going on the offensive against the threat of patent-infringement lawsuits, The Wall Street Journal reported on its Web site Sunday evening.

From time to time I need to start some applications from command line, either to watch for debug messages, or to run the application as a different user.

A good CRM package does you no good if employees aren't willing to use it. Case in point: IMA Financial Group, a medium-sized financial services company based in Wichita, Kansas. IMA had installed a commercial customer relationship management system that "was flexible and configurable and attractive on the front end," says business processes manager Jennifer Hallam.

There’s a nice little Facebook app that’s called “Linux” that proudly displays which distribution you use on your profile page: