You turn on your trusty old Linux box, and things are going well as you pass through the boot loader, until the disk check reveals that your hard drive partition table is corrupt, and you are unable to access your machine. You need a good rescue disk — and the best way to get one is to create your own.

Many times we face a situation when our Ubuntu Netbook becomes pretty slow. And when we check out our RAM, we find that only half of our RAM is used and the SWAP memory usage is gone upto 25% or 50% or even more. Confused??

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 the second article on dual-booting Windows 7 and Ubuntu 10.10 on a computer with one hard disk. The first, how to dual-boot Ubuntu 10.10 and Windows 7, showed how to accomplish the task with GRUB 2, the boot loader used by Ubuntu, installed on the Master Boot Record (MBR) of the hard disk. That is, GRUB is responsible for the dual-booting task.

This guide shows how to install and use the smartmontools package on Debian Etch and Ubuntu 7.10. The smartmontools package provides utilities to check hard disks for disk degradation and failure, using the Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology System (SMART) built into most modern ATA and SCSI hard disks.

You turn on your trusty old Linux box, and things are going well as you pass through the book loader, until the disk check reveals that your hard drive partition table is corrupt, and you are unable to access your machine. You need a good rescue disk -- and the best way to get one is to create your own.

badblocks is a Free software to check for bad sectors on a disk drive. It creates a list of these sectors that can be used with other programs, like mkfs, so that they are not used in the future and thus do not cause corruption of data. It is part of the e2fsprogs project.

Installing Ubuntu 11.04 or any other distribution on an external hard drive connected to a computer via USB is about the same as installing it on an internal hard disk. The key is to remember, after partitioning the disk, to install GRUB, the boot loader, in the MBR of the external disk, rather than in the MBR of the internal disk.

Occasional criticism of Ubuntu as a less-than-perfect Linux distribution, and of Canonical as a selfish member of the free-software ecosystem, is nothing new.  But no matter how many flaws one can find with Ubuntu and its developers, they have succeeded in respects where every similar endeavor to date has failed