This little cutie weighs in at 13 oz (370 gr) including the internal hard drive. That low weight would make shipping much cheaper, and the extreme low power usage is nice too. At 6 Watts its far more energy efficient than anything else we have in the company IT stable – including 20 Watt Asus eee netbooks. It ships with a choice of Windows XP and Ubuntu so it could handle all of our needs.

France’s Gendarmerie Nationale, the country’s national police force, says it has saved millions of dollars by migrating its desktop software infrastructure away from Microsoft Windows and replacing it with the Ubuntu Linux distribution. The Gendarmerie began its transition to open source software in 2005 when it replaced Microsoft Office with OpenOffice.org across the entire organization.  Read more »

Seagate has announces, in its Knowlege Base, that the problem is a result of bad firmware and that drive owners can protect themselves by upgrading the firmware for the affected drives. The KB article assumes that you are a Windows user. They provide a tool to let Windows users scan their drives and discover the model number, serial number, and firmware revision. However, if you are a Linux user their Knowledge Base article is not going to help you. Fortunately, this information is very easy retrieve in most Linux installations. If you are using a Debian or Ubuntu install this method will definitely work.

The smart money is on those who understand that this really only applies to the class of PC users who actually give a damn about which OS is running on their system. Sadly, at present, thats a tiny fraction of users. People use what they are given or what they used in school or at the office. Those of us who shuttle back and forth between multiple OS’s or even multiple incarnations of the same OS will continue to do what we always have and select the best tool for the job.

As more people use iTunes to download TV shows and movies or as people do more video editing the size of the files they work with get biggr and bigger. Ext4 addresses this problem and keeps Linux ahead of the curve for users who need to work with lots and lots of data.