Time for the second article of highly useful, cool and fun utilities, commands, and tricks that should help you gain better productivity and understand your system better.

I'm set to interview Novell CEO Ron Hovsepian and Chief Marketing Officer/Channel Chief John Dragoon at the Novell BrainShare conference in Salt Lake City, Utah on March 22. Here are five key questions for Hovsepian and Dragoon, with the emphasis on the future of Novell and SUSE Linux.

BAR is backup archiver program to create compressed and encrypted archives of files that can be stored on a hard disk, CD, DVD, or directly on a server via FTP, SCP, or SFTP. A server mode and a scheduler are integrated for making automated backups in the background. A graphical front end that can connect to the (remote) server is included.

Novell BrainShare started March 21 in Salt Lake City, Utah. The company is gradually winning back channel partners like VARs and systems integrators, thanks to SUSE Linux. But so far, Novell doesn't seem to have a compelling story for the fastest growing portion of the channel -- managed services providers (MSPs). The big question: Do MSPs care about Novell?

The ongoing debate over the change in the position of the window buttons in the upcoming Ubuntu release, Lucid Lynx, reminds one that Linux users possess one awful characteristic in spades - a sense of entitlement.

Today, SCO rested its case, such as it is. I can't believe they were eager to go to court with just this. I haven't seen any evidence that they own the copyrights. Just memories through the mists of time that some folks thought they were supposed to get them.

Did Windows crash beyond repair? If so, you probably want to get your files off of the drive before you erase everything and reinstall Windows. This tutorial will help you do exactly that. We're going to use Ubuntu's LiveCD mode. Ubuntu is a popular Linux distribution that's a free and open source alternative to Windows.