[Dell] could hardly do better than to buy Red Hat, or possibly Sun or Novell, for two reasons. The first is that buying Red Hat might be the least painful option for Dell getting into software in earnest, as it would offer Dell a close analog to what it has done to hardware: a commoditized software business that depends heavily on low-cost assembly and distribution.

This short guide explains how you can configure software RAID to send you an email when something's wrong with RAID, for example if a hard drive fails. I've tested this on Debian Etch, but it should apply to all other distributions with minor adjustments to paths, etc.

Software piracy is a scourge on the world of computing. Yet it's a problem the open source community doesn't have. That makes sense; it's all freely available. But this raises the question: if it's free how do the developers make any money? And how can it be any damn good?

Matt Asay, author of The Open Road — a popular blog on CNet — suggests two reasons why Dell should acquire Red Hat. Alas, The VAR Guy strongly disagrees with Mr. Asay. Here are seven reasons why Dell will never acquire Red Hat.

Graphical Twitter clients are a dime a dozen these days, but what if you want to use the ubiquitous micro-blogging service from the terminal? On machines like Linutop or netbooks, running a graphical Twitter client is a waste of precious resources, so a command-line tool like Twidge can come in rather handy.

The Linux command-line can appear pretty complicated and occasionally even a little alarming. But it also offers a whole stack of helpful documentation which you can access directly from the command-line. Read on to learn how to help yourself when – or even before – you get stuck.

eCryptfs is a POSIX-compliant enterprise-class stacked cryptographic filesystem for Linux. It provides advanced key management and policy features.