(Token Disclaimer: I don’t mean to start a flame war. Let’s not argue gnome vs KDE. This is simply an observation of mine. I hope someone might have a solution for it.)

The VAR Guy is packing his bags and plans to attend Ubuntu LIVE July 22 in Portland, Oregon. While prepping for the event, he spotted four key developments in the Linux market — including a possible surprise announcement from Hewlett-Packard Co.

Shred utility overwrites a file to hide its contents, and optionally delete it if needed. The idea is pretty simple as it overwrites the specified FILE(s) repeatedly, in order to make it harder for even very expensive hardware probing to recover the data. By default file is overwritten 25 times.

There is a discussion going on at SugarCRM's forum page, "Why the Sugar license is mad, bad and may be dangerous" -- part of a much larger discussion that Matt Aslett captures well in this article on the current state of such non-OSI-approved licenses -- that reminded me that I've been meaning to explain something to you about trademarks.

Forget software politics for a minute -- what does the new Samba licensing mean for the version you're actually running, and for the distribution that packages it for you? Samba maintainer Jeremy Allison explains.

Gobuntu is a just like Kubuntu or Xubuntu, a flavor of the Ubuntu distribution that has a very strict set of restrictions on the licenses of code and content.

In this day and age, most of us have a computer powerful enough to handle most of the applications we need and use. Making sure you have the right hardware, the right drivers and an application compatible with your operating system can be a challenge. In a corporate environment, invariably there is a diversity of hardware and users with different requirements.

In order for a migration to be successful, one needs to be familiar with native Linux applications, and the data needs to be stored in a format that is independent from just a single application.