Roll up Puppy Linux. Yet Another Linux Distro!?! No, it's not just another distro, this one is different and this is why. It runs off a live CD but the coolest thing is that you can now make your own custom cut-down Puppified linux from the distro of your choice using Puppy Woof!.

Suppose someone wants to send you a large file. They could try to send it via email, but many email servers impose limits on file size. They could try sending it over during an instant messenger or Internet Relay Chat session, but that's slow, as the file actually gets transferred twice: once to the chat server, then to your machine.

Why are open source file sharing applications so popular? The answer to that question may be obvious to some, but the explosion in paid-for, online digital content services in recent years hasn't dented the download rates of free file sharing applications.

With three desktop machines (Kubuntu, Win XP and a testbed, which is currently running ReactOS) and a laptop (Xubuntu) in use at home, our IT is reaching small office proportions, and like many small offices, we run into file sharing problems.

One the coolest file systems in User Space has got to be GlusterFS. It has a very unique architecture that allows it to be configured for specific storage requirements and scenarios. It can be used as a high-performance parallel file system, or a cloud based file system, or even a simple NFS server. All of this in user-space.

It happens to everyone sooner or later: a split second after you hit Enter you realize your mistake, but it's too late; you just deleted a valuable file or directory for which no backup exists. Or maybe you have a backup, but it's a month old... and in shock you see the past month flash before your eyes as you realize in pain what you'll have to do all over again...

Ah, Usenet newsgroups… Online communication and file sharing for the masses, still equal today to what it was before the advent of blogs, instant messaging and P2P networks.

You can change the owner and group of a file or a directory with the chown command. Please, keep in mind you can do this only if you are the root user or the owner of the file. Set the file's owner: $ chown username somefile After giving this command, the new owner of a file called somefile will be the user username. The file's group owner will not change.

With Giver, you can share files between desktops on your network with absolutely no configuration necessary. Other Giver clients are automatically discovered using Avahi.