Have you ever wished you had access to your Linux distribution's online package repositories when you didn't have access to the Internet, or when your access was slow and unreliable?

Backing up partitions and hard disks sounds like work -- until you've tried Clonezilla. With Clonezilla you can clone and duplicate partitions of various formats and disks of various sizes locally or over the network. Even more impressive is the fact that you can do all this without typing complicated commands.

The Linux community is splitting -- right down the middle, at this point -- over Microsoft's controversial claims that the open source operating system infringes on patents it holds. On June 19, Paris-based Mandriva became the third Linux vendor within five days to say it isn't interested in signing a licensing deal with Microsoft to avoid possible infringement claims.

Proprietary record formats will increase the difficulty of preserving our culture, on top of the problems with obsolete hardware interfaces and the decay of storage media we think of as permanent. File data formats that are not published standards are just asking for trouble for long term data storage.

The Ubuntu focused "Full Circle Magazine" has just released issue 2.

As the open-source movement completes its first decade, the fast-growing industry is at a crossroads, experts say, having advanced from nerdy novelty to recognized market niche while attracting the double-edged attention of its biggest rivals.

Unless you're an old Linux user, you've only probably used the KDE, GNOME or Xfce desktop environments. But since the time when these desktops were in their infancy, the Enlightenment desktop environment has been impressing users. Bringing this mature, visually appealing environment to new Linux users is what the Elive distribution is all about.

"Over the past several days I've been mulling over the news of Intel's apparent backstabbing of the Linux and BSD communities by hiding the truth about the flaws in their Core 2 chips."